Dark Horse
by gythia
Summary: A sequel to the Loribond series. Why did the Major make that broadcast? Warnings: violence, torture, obscenity. B5/ Time Yarns crossover.
1. Chapter 1

A Major Conspiracy

This is the first in the Dark Horse series. The Dark Horse series is a sequel to the Loribond series. The main original characters in Dark Horse are the main original characters from the Loribond series: Carla, Firuun, and The Major, who finally gets a name in this series: Major Reginald Sands.

\

The electronic bosun's whistle sounded.

"Request permission to come aboard, Capt. Ivanova." The man in the green uniform of the Earth Alliance Marines saluted.

"Permission granted. Welcome aboard the Medusa, Major Sands." The woman in the blue uniform of the Earth Alliance Navy returned the salute.

The Marines trooped onboard. Ivanova's crew got them settled in the converted storage area that now served as their barracks. Triple stacked bunks marched in orderly rows down what had been a cargo bay. The Major got his own cabin, and his two lieutenants shared one.

His first night onboard, Major Sands dined with the Captain. Since they were still in port—if one could use that term of a parking orbit—the food was fresh and local.

"I have no idea what this is," commented Capt. Susan Ivanova, holding up a fork with some pinkish vegetable on it. "But it sure beats that reconstituted stuff."

"It's a parnish. Cross between a parsnip and a radish. They're the Mars equivalent of a potato: they have it with everything, in every possible way."

"Oh? Are you a local fellow, Major?"

"No, I'm from Earth. But I've served on Mars most of my career. Most of my men have, too."

"Well, then anti-piracy patrol is going to be a new thing for you."

"May I speak frankly, Captain?"

"Yes. Go on." Ivanova gestured at him encouragingly with the fork as she took another bite of the parnish.

"I don't believe there are any pirates, ma'am. This isn't a patrol, it's a warehouse for excess gropos. Earth has to stick us somewhere, now that we aren't out hunting Marsie terrorists. I expect they'll start slashing the military budget and mustering out most of the Marine troops as fast as they can write the orders."

"No bets on the budget," Ivanova said. "The independence of Mars and the outer colonies is as good an excuse as any for the politicians to turn inwards for a while. And god knows, Earth needs some attention from somebody, to root out all the—" Ivanova stopped herself from saying anything politically loaded. She did not know what side the Major had been on in the recent war. She finished, "—bad influences. But there actually have been reports of pirate attacks on Earth shipping."

"I know. I just don't believe it. I think it's an insurance scam."

Ivanova raised her eyebrows. "Based on what, Major Sands?"

"All three of the ships reported lost to pirates came from Wex Shipping. Old ships, notorious ships, at least among the family. High repair bills. Low tonnage capacity. The Mesquite had a smell you could never get out of your clothes. Ship out on it once and you'd have to burn them and shave your head when you got back. The Creosote was accidentally built at 7/8 scale. That's what you get when you hire an alien subcontractor who THINKS he speaks English and doesn't check stuff in the computer. You were always banging your head on the access ladder entryways or getting your shoulders bruised if you forgot to turn sideways when entering the bridge. And don't get me started on the Rabbitbrush. That ship was cursed."

"Oh. You're one of those Sands. So, uh, why are you…"

"In the Marines? Yes, I could be a merchanter captain if I wanted to be. I joined the Earth Force to get away from my family. I can't stand them. The worst lot of schemers and backstabbers I've ever encountered, and I've spent the last fifteen years in anti-terror."

"Wow. So, Major, I'll make you a bet. If we do find any pirates out there, you owe me dinner. Something involving fresh fruits and vegetables. Do we have a bet?"

"We have a bet, Captain."

\

Debris spun in space. There was no star here, no nebula, nothing to light the wreckage but the faintest starlight. Even an infrared scan showed no red; the Scrub Pine was as cold as space, its engines off for days. All the fires had long since run out of escaping oxygen, and its environmental system was down. That meant there was no possibility of rescuing survivors. If the crew had gotten to the life pods, the pirates must have picked them up.

"I've never been more sorry to be proved right," said Capt. Ivanova. She called the Major to the bridge.

He arrived as the Medusa completed a scan of the area, and found no trail to follow.

"Major Sands. Transponder signal identifies the wreck as the Scrub Pine. Was that one of your family ships?"

"It was."

"One nobody cared about?"

"That's right. But I don't get it. There's enough wreckage there to account for the whole ship. It was really destroyed. After being sacked, I'd assume, if it were a real pirate attack. The ship was unarmed. So if they destroyed it, it would have had to be to cover up the evidence."

"So far, that tracks with your insurance scam theory."

"Yes, but, where is the crew? The other three wrecks, the crew all got away safely in lifepods."

"Maybe whoever destroyed the ship took the crew aboard. Whether they were pirates or…" Ivanova trailed off.

"Captain, I'd like to suit up and take a team aboard to examine the wreckage."

"Good."

\

"Find anything?"

"Nothing useful," said the Major. "All the evidence is probably on the pirate ship. Or whoever they are. But there weren't any bodies onboard, so we can assume the crew is either hostage on a pirate ship or they're being quietly transferred back to Wex Shipping somewhere."

"Or both."

"Yes, or both, thank you, Captain. I should not assume that the crew's return automatically means the pirates aren't pirates. They could be ransoming them. My brother has his faults, but he doesn't throw away the lives of his people."

"There's another place to look for evidence, if Wex Shipping is really setting up its own transports."

"I know. But I don't have access to that kind of information. I haven't completely cut myself off from my family, but I've never asked much about business, not about the high level stuff. Since granddad died, my mom has been the Chairman of the Board, but my brother Cedric is the CEO. Mom's a barracuda, but she wouldn't go in for working with pirates. Or arsonists, or whatever they are. She's strictly law and order. She was a rabid Clarkist. I always refused to discuss politics, giving the excuse that a military officer has an obligation to support his superiors, but, as you can imagine, that excuse didn't hold as much weight during the civil war. I fell back on the excuse that whatever I did on Mars during the war was classified, but they pretty much got the idea that I wasn't an enthusiastic Regulationist. Anyway, the point is, I've sort of burned that bridge, and I'd have to do something pretty spectacular to convince them I'm on their side again."

"If the opportunity comes up, to do something spectacular, would you take it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I would. I don't like the direction Cedric's been taking the company since he took over the day to day operations. It's only been a few months since granddad's death reshuffled everything. I get the idea that something's going on, something more than just a scam involving pirate attacks on ships that ought to be scrapped. Cedric's up to something. Something else."

"Something illegal?"

"Maybe not. It could just be more politics. Wex is bleeding money. The shipping line's more profitable than ever, and the pirate losses actually come out positive, that's why I tagged it as an insurance scam to begin with. But Wex was also heavily into some kind of military shipbuilding project that was backed by the Clarkist government, and was abandoned after the war. It was a classified project, and I have no reason to know what it was, especially with the distance I've put between myself and the family. But whatever it was, Wex sank a lot of resources into it. We've either got to spin it off for civilian use somehow, or get back a good sized piece of the military shipbuilding pie. Which, right now, is locked up tight by pro-Interstellar Alliance companies who are angling for parts of the contract to build the new super-Whitestar-class, whatever it ends up being called."

"So what could he be up to with politics? Trying to get in on building the new super-Whitestar?"

"No. He'd never manage it, PR-wise. Not with Wex being one of the largest corporate donors to the Regulationist Party. No, Cedric's been photographed literally arm in arm with Clark a hundred times, there is no chance he could morph himself into an IA supporter without being seen as a wishy-washy flipflopper, which is much worse than losing a lot of money in his first quarter as CEO, in the long term. No, if whatever we were working on doesn't have a civilian application, then he's got to get Earthdome to restore funding to it. He's got to get the Regulationists back in power."

"Fat chance. With Nightwatch being dismantled, and ISN free again, and congress back, and the constitution restored, and everything that's been coming out about the things that happened under Clark, only the real fringe element would vote his party back in power now. Besides, who would they run? All their most famous people are on trial for war crimes."

"A dark horse candidate. A staunch Regulationist who wasn't actually in the government, and so could not have been involved in any of the atrocities. Maybe Cedric himself, I don't know."

"There's a happy thought," Ivanova said in an ironic tone.

"You said it, Captain. You know? It's great to be able to talk about all this. My thoughts are becoming much clearer. If a spectacular opportunity comes my way, I'll take it."

"Good. In the meantime, do you have any ideas on how we might track down the pirate ship?"

\

But with Major Sands assigned to the patrol corridor, the pirates, or whoever they were, never struck again. Which made him suspect that his family was indeed behind the pirate attacks, and they did not want to risk him.

Then he and all his Marines were mysteriously transferred to a regular Earth Force cruiser, and Capt. Ivanova's ship was reassigned to a deep space patrol, far off the trade lanes. Major Sands was assigned to participate in war games on Babylon 5.

And that was when the spectacular opportunity fell into his lap.

If there was a God, then surely he had been listening to Major Sands when he had spoken with Capt. Ivanova. For the universe, or God, or plain good luck delivered Sheridan to him. A prisoner. Bound and marked up as if he had been tortured. And a co-operative ISN reporter ready to hand.

When Major Sands got back to his ship, he immediately resigned his commission. If he was going to go home riding this broadcast, he could not go with half measures. This had to look as real as he could make it from here on out.

He collected his things and rented a hotel room on the station. He was going home on the first civilian transport. Home, to where he never wanted to be. But he was done hiding his head in the red sands of Mars. Earth Force Marines weren't welcome there anymore. And in any case, his grandfather was no longer around to drive him crazy. It was time. Time to become who he had been born to be.

He tapped into his large bank account and got a real-time transmission channel to his mother on Earth.

"Hi mom. By now you've probably seen the broadcast. I'm sorry you had to find out this way. But it really was classified. I didn't know they were going to release it."

"What broadcast?"

"Oh. Um… Nobody's called you and told you to turn on ISN?"

"I'm at the lake, Reggie. Ali only brought me the stellarcom because it was you. You so rarely ever call. Your military duties and all, I understand."

"Oh." Sands had not anticipated this. He was off script. The pause went on a few seconds too long.

"What is this about, honey?"

"The last time we talked. Really talked, I mean, not just exchanged news. I don't know how we got on the subject, but I told you I wouldn't talk about Sheridan, and you got mad, and I got mad, and it was just a mess. I really, truly could not tell you. Like I said, what I did on Mars was classified. I know you must have thought we were having a political argument, and I really wished I could have come clean, but I had my orders."

"Make sense, Reggie."

"Go ahead and turn on the news. Somebody's going to ask you about it sooner or later, you might as well see it first. I'm coming home, mom. I resigned my commission."

"What? Why? Reggie, the Marines meant the world to you. I know you loved your work."

"I did. I'm lucky I'm not going before a tribunal, mom. I had to use all our pull. I dropped the company name. I know I swore I'd never do that to advance my career, but this was different."

"Reggie, what are you talking about?"

"Sheridan. On Mars."

"You mean when he was captured? Did your unit bring him in?"

"No, what they said on the news at the time was true. He was turned in by one of his own."

"Then, what happened? What's on the news?"

"Me. Interrogating him."

"What?" she whispered. "I thought…"

"I know. I know what you must have thought. I'm coming home. I'm lucky I'm not going on trial for war crimes. See you soon, mom."

He cut the comm.

He figured she was probably going to tune in ISN right away. He had until he got back to Earth to create an airtight story based around that broadcast.

"Damn. I've become one of the schemers and backstabbers. Breeding always tells."

The End

Look for the next story in the Dark Horse series: Carla the Ranger


	2. Chapter 2

Carla the Ranger

Second in the Dark Horse series, which is a sequel to the Loribond series.

\

"Old soldiers never die," Carla quoted to herself as she moved into her new digs. "They just fade away."

She was not fading away. She had not actually lost any weight, since she had started cutting back on groceries to save money. She made up for it in the empty calories contained in cadged drinks.

But she was fading into the background of the station. Her military pension was a pittance compared to the cost of staying in a station hotel. She had moved to an apartment fairly quickly after deciding to remain on Babylon 5. Then she had moved into a smaller apartment. And now she was moving into a room. In downbelow.

At least her things did not look so paltry in the smaller space. She had only intended to come to the station for a few weeks, and had left most of her possessions behind on Earth. She did not miss them. It felt curiously freeing to be back down to a duffel bag, like when she was a gropo. Her Earth landlord had probably sold her stuff by now.

It was nearly happy hour. Carla glanced around at her new room one more time before throwing a cloak around herself and heading out the door. She did not feel comfortable walking around downbelow in her signature bright blue and red FPFP jacket. It was too conspicuous. She felt she should not draw attention to herself down here, where the gravity was light and the light was dim.

She took off the cloak in the elevator before stepping out into the Zocalo, revealing the still-bright colors of the old jacket underneath. With her cloak folded over her arm, she went to the bar and looked around for the tall form of Firuun, who towered over everyone even while sitting down.

Just as she used to search a crowd for Ike, back when the FPFP had been her main social set. Ike was a giant, too, but looked more like a basketball player than a street fighter's worst nightmare. Firuun's military caste origins were written in the sharpness of his head spikes; he looked like he could run someone through by head-butting him.

Carla spotted Firuun, not among the bar regulars but with a group of other black-armored Minbari, probably off his ship. She did not hesitate for a moment. Firuun was her best friend. Which was a little sad, perhaps, but true.

"Hi, Firuun." Carla plopped down in an empty seat a couple of places from Firuun. "Buy me a drink?"

"Sure, Carla." Firuun waved for the bartender. "So when is it going to be your turn to buy?"

"When I find a job. I not only can't get anything in private security, I can't get anything in anything. Nothing legitimate, anyway. Hell, I couldn't even get a job in this bar. I tried. 'Psychological discharge' will dog me forever. It's better than the stockade, mind you."

"It's just horrifying that they kicked you out of the military. I know humans don't actually have a military caste, but…"

"I'm the closest thing there is to it," Carla said. "Old Navy family from the pre space days. Did you know Marines were originally troops carried on sailing ships? The word refers to Earth's oceans."

"Huh."

The bartender appeared with Carla's usual beer.

One of the other Minbari at the table said, "You handled yourself well in the boarding action. Despite the borrowed armor obviously being a little too big for you. I was right behind you when you exited the breeching pod."

Carla smiled. "That was the best moment of the last fifteen years. For an hour, I was military again."

Some of the Minbari warriors made brushing-off gestures which were the Minbari equivalent of a shudder. "The idea that someone could be made to leave the military just horrifies us," said one of the warriors. "We've all told ourselves it's not the same for humans, but perhaps we were wrong."

"Some humans never intend to stick with the military all their lives. They go in, they go out," Carla replied. "But I was a career noncom. A petty officer."

"It's not fair," said Firuun. "I've seen you fight. Not just in the boarding action, which didn't actually have any combat in it. We surprised them. But I've seen you fight right here in this bar, and you're good at it. You're still a warrior, Carla, whatever your people tried to make of you."

"Thank you, Firuun. You don't know what it meant to me to be in a battle again, even if we didn't actually ever fire our guns. That day I had myself back."

"It's human law that's keeping you down. Why not see if non humans will hire you?"

"I have. Human females just aren't in demand as mercenaries. The only offers I've gotten have been for things I'd fight to get away from. Then there's the underground economy, of course, but I'll never be that desperate. I don't just want to fight. I want to fight for something. Barfighting is nice but it's like bar food, just not as satisfying as the real thing. And fighting for some slimeball of the sub economy? No thanks. When I was a Marine my service meant something. It wasn't just the fighting. It was knowing that if I died fighting, I was dying for something that mattered."

"Purpose," said one of the Minbari.

"Yes. Purpose. Not that being a store security guard would be much of a purpose, but it would be better than nothing. But I keep running up against my military record. Under Earth law I'm not permitted to own or wear a weapon of any kind, and most kinds of security work are closed to me just because of that, even if they don't run a background check, which all legit places are sure to do."

Firuun considered. "How would defending the Interstellar Alliance do for a Purpose?"

Carla snorted. "Sure, why not? As long as I'm dreaming, I might as well dream big."

"I mean for real. Fight. Gather intelligence. Be a hero, even. The hope of the downtrodden, the bane of evildoers everywhere."

"Sounds great. Where do I sign up?" Carla tossed off lightly, and finished her beer.

"Walk in the dark places, where no one else will go. Live for the One, die for the One."

Carla set down her mug and stared. "Really? No. You can't be serious. The Rangers? Do they take women?"

"There have been a few, over the centuries. I heard they took a Pakmera. Why not you?"

Carla grinned. "Thank you, Firuun." She stood up and leaned over the table. For a moment it looked as if she might try to plant a kiss on his cheek, but she was too far away. Instead Carla planted a hand on his shoulder pauldron and gave it a squeeze. "Where do I sign up?" This time, she said it with joy, and hope, and pride.

"Minbar," Firuun said. "Maybe I could talk the Captain into giving you a ride. We're shipping out tomorrow."

"Shipping out? I thought your tour wasn't over for another four months."

"The station commander apparently took a dislike to that little redecorating project you and I participated in. Lochley didn't want a hole there, it seems."

"Oh. The breeching pod. Right."

"Let's have a toast! To Carla the Ranger!"

The other Minbari joined Firuun in toasting Carla. She smiled and thanked them in Minbari.

"I didn't know you spoke Minbari," Firuun said.

"Just a little," she responded, again in Minbari. Then she switched to English. "I'm a little rusty. But Rangers are supposed to speak three languages. I've got to get started. At my age you don't learn a language quickly. Well, humans don't, anyway, I don't know about you guys."

Firuun gestured to the bartender again, but when he appeared, Carla said, "No more beer for me. I'm in training. Got anything healthy?"

The barkeep brought her a fruity yoghurt drink.

"No beer?" Firuun asked, looking at her as if she had suddenly sprouted a second head.

"If I'm going to be competing with boys young enough to be my sons, I've got to get in shape. I haven't really been taking care of my body."

"Hey, look," said Firuun. "There's some of those gropos from the wargames. Let's have one last barfight before we go."

Carla grinned. "It'll be my pleasure."

"Just tell me one thing," said Firuun. "I still haven't figured out what a Denebian slime devil is."

Carla laughed. "Remind me to explain science fiction later."

She got up and approached a table full of ground-pounders in green uniforms, and made the ritual exchange of insults. None of them got up to fight for Major Sands, instead looking at each other as if embarrassed. She had to think of the name of their carrier ship's Captain before she got the desired response.

Then one of the smaller women got up and took a swing at her. She ducked and gave her the old one-two, and Firuun and the other Minbari all jumped up. The gropos looked a little shocked, but they rose to the occasion and waded in. Soon the whole bar was engulfed in punching, kicking, and wrestling forms, and the sound of breaking glass.

Carla grinned as she punched out her opponent. Life was good.

\

The smack of metal on metal resounded in the Minbari warship's gym. It was not the ringing of swords, but the dull sound of Minbari Fighting Pikes clashing together.

Carla's hair was plastered to her head with sweat. Once again Firuun's superior strength sent her sprawling, and once again she rolled and popped back up again in a ready stance. She had learned to roll long ago, in Marine combat training, but doing so while holding onto an eight foot long metal pole took some getting used to.

"Not bad," Firuun said. "Just keep it tucked up a little more." They tried it again, and this time Firuun said, "That's it. You've got it."

"Am I ready?" Carla asked.

"As ready as I can make you in three days," said Firuun. "You know they'll teach you the Pike in Ranger training."

"I have to convince them to let me train, first," Carla said. She switched to Minbari, and tried to translate the human expression 'you never get a second chance to make a first impression'.

Firuun suppressed a smile. "Your talent is definitely in combat, not languages." He retracted his Pike, and Carla did the same.

"Oh oh," she said, starting to stretch and cool down. "What did I say?"

"No, I could understand it fine, it just sounds a little funny. Did you know you speak Minbari with a Shoreline accent? You sound like a, um, dalshon, I don't think there is a word for it in the human tongue. One of those who waits for the old and the dying who are going to the sea, and either sells them a boat or robs them, depending on their mood that day. Also digs clams."

Carla laughed. "Dalshon. Boatbuilder, clamdigger, and pirate? Arrrr."

"Well, not actual clams, of course. Minbari shore creatures. Some of them are for eating. Some of them you don't want to touch bare handed. The dalshon know the difference."

Carla suddenly became very serious. "Then perhaps I am a dalshon. I would know a baltor mar if I saw one again."

"Me too," Firuun said quietly. "And the smell." He made a wordless sound of disgust. "Of course, the smell of the jar didn't come out in the highlight reel. Did you know, they're selling stills from the Sheridan Vs. Recnar Highlight Reel in the Zocalo? I can just picture what John will do the first time someone asks him to autograph one."

Carla finished her stretches and creaked to her feet. "I hear he once spaced a teddy bear that had his initials sewn on its jacket."

"What's a teddy bear?"

\

The cities of Minbar looked like forests of tears. Blue crystal dominated the skyline.

"The last time I was on Minbar was for the Ritual of Endurance," Firuun said, in Minbari.

"Are you going to take home leave, now that your ship is going to be parked in Minbar orbit for a while?" Carla responded in Minbari. She had been practicing on the trip, and had found she had not forgotten nearly as much as she thought she had.

"Not me. Not engineering. We're going to be busy, putting in the latest upgrades."

The pilot set the shuttle down on the landing pad in the middle of the Anla'shok training center. This was the original training base, attached to the Anla'shok headquarters, a thousand years old, dating to the founding of the Rangers by Valen. Now there were other bases on other worlds, but this was still the largest.

The pilot lowered the ramp, and Carla walked onto Minbar carrying her duffel. Firuun was right behind her.

An official looking group came out of a building and started walking toward them.

"Are they expecting us?" Carla asked.

"They're expecting a new recruit. I asked John to ask Delenn to tell them one of the people involved in his rescue from the Earth Alliance Marines was coming to join the Anla'shok. But they aren't expecting you."

Carla's mouth quirked in amusement. "This will be fun." Carla set down her duffel bag and turned to her friend. "Until we meet again, Firuun." She embraced him. She only came up to his stomach, and for a moment she felt like a child.

Firuun hugged her back. "Until we meet." Then he switched to English. "Good luck." Firuun turned and went back onto the shuttle. The ship took off, kicking up white dust and blowing out Carla's hair. She did not look back.

The four Minbari and one human who came out to meet her faltered a bit when they realized it was her, and not Firuun, who was there to join the Rangers. Then they started walking again.

Carla picked up her duffel and met them.

The oldest of the Minbari asked her in English, "Why do you wish to join the Anla'shok?"

"To reclaim my self," Carla answered in Minbari.

They waited a moment, but Carla did not elaborate. Finally the old Minbari nodded. He spoke in Minbari now. "A better reason than most of those that I hear. What is your name?"

"Carla."

"Will you live for the One, will you die for the One?"

"I will."

"Then come, Carla of the Anla'shok." He gestured to the human. "Lee will find quarters for you."

\

The Fighting Pike class was strangely silent. So far they were only learning moves, and had not progressed to sparring. No staff clashed against another staff.

Carla resolved to practice her rolls and the other things she had learned from Firuun after all her classes were over, when no one else was using the Pike training room.

She practiced blocks, attacks, and reverses in the air, along with the other beginners. Some of them had been here only a few weeks, others were almost ready to go on to the intermediate level.

Concentrating on the pure movements, without watching an opponent, Carla could see the English heritage of the quarterstaff in the tradition of the Minbari Fighting Pike. Why it was called a Pike, she could not guess. It had no cutting or thrusting end on it. It was really just a retractable staff.

The Minbari instructor called for a halt. "Valen said, the Anla'shok stand on the bridge, and none may pass."

Carla reflected that if she needed any proof that Valen was a human, that was proof enough. The image those words called to her mind was pure Little John and the Quarterstaff, out of the legend of Robin Hood.

The instructor ended the class, and Carla and the other trainees filed out to go change out of white workout gear and back into their uniforms, and assemble for the midday meal. The Anla'shok uniform was really just a black vest with a pin on it. The shirt and pants that went underneath were supplied by the students, and were of various colors, though everyone tried for a dark appearance that would not present a good sniper target.

Carla had been here for almost a week now. When she sat in the mess hall with the other trainees, they no longer expressed any surprise to see a middle aged woman with them. As usual, the recruits, both human and Minbari, conversed in Minbari. The Pakmera, thankfully, was not there; he ate alone in his quarters, which were far away from everyone else's.

One of the young Minbari, Duar, said, "I hear Slenar is going to be torturing us with his notorious lecture on gathering open source information this afternoon. Better have some of that human coffee stuff."

"That sounds like an interesting topic," said one of the other Minbari, a not quite fully grown boy named Khunnier.

"My older brother is an advanced student," Duar replied. "He says Slenar could make a recitation of the First Appearance of Valen sound boring. His words will burrow right into your brain like baltor mar and you'll be snoring in minutes."

"They don't burrow," said Carla. "They're placed surgically with a trefoil scalpel."

"Trefoil scalpel?" Duar repeated, startled. "Where did you learn to speak Minbari?"

"Oh, did I say it wrong?"

"No, you said it perfectly, that's what's so odd. Well, perfectly with a Coastline accent, anyway. You don't read Minbari at all, you don't know any words for philosophy, or the names of the great literary figures, but you know how to say that?"

Carla studied her plate and took a bite of flarn. No one had supplied a new topic by the time she was done chewing it, so she said, "I'd like to learn to read Minbari. I presume there will be a class on it sometime."

"Come on," Duar persisted. "What kind of weird school did you go to?"

Khunnier interceded. "Obviously it wasn't a school. You really need Slenar's lecture if you can't put those obvious clues together. Now about your brother, Duar. What other tips can he give us?"

Carla smiled gratefully at Khunnier for changing the topic.

Later, as they took seats for the lecture, Khunnier sat by Carla and said, "You're welcome."

"You a telepath, too?" Carla asked.

"I wish. No, I just love a mystery. And you're a mystery, Carla. One day the teachers get an order straight from Entilza Delenn, saying to accept the new Anla'shok candidate she's sending on, without a word of explanation, except that the new person did well in a boarding action by a Minbari war cruiser recently. They think they're preparing to meet some young hotshot from the military caste, and then you show up."

"Oh, it's not that hard to explain," Carla said. "I was in the boarding action. The Captain let me tag along." Out of pity, probably, Carla thought. Or maybe some misplaced race guilt. "And now I'm here. I'm myself again. A fresh start."

Khunnier said, "I've wanted to be Anla'shok all my life. When I was a small child, they were an ancient and mysterious order, more exclusive than any group I knew of. When I was an older child, the Anla'shok became the secret agents of the Shadow War, collecting intelligence, carrying messages, working with secret resistance groups. I got books on codes, and studied them until my parents said I'd go blind if I didn't go outside and play. And then they were the captains of the Whitestar Fleet, great warriors in the great war. And now they've become some kind of police force, patrolling Interstellar Alliance space. But they're still all the other things they used to be. And it's intelligence gathering that excites my imagination."

"Ah. So you're trying to figure me out."

"I've already got one thing figured out. Duar and the some of the others don't know enough about humans to tell how old you are. That's why he thinks you came here straight from some school. Here are the clues, and here's my analysis. Clue: you're old enough to have been in the Earth-Minbari war. Clue: you speak Minbari with a Shoreline accent. Like the dalshons of Clan Itma. Clue: you don't know how to say 'meditation' but you do know how to say 'trefoil scalpel'. Clue: you speak of the baltor mar like you have personal experience with them. Conclusion: you learned Minbari as a prisoner of war. On Tifar. From Comac of Clan Itma."

Carla sighed. "It was before you were born, Khunnier. I lost my self on Tifar. I just didn't know it yet. I didn't realize what the consequences were going to be until much later. I thought I was free, when I was first released. Then there was The Night. And then prison, until they figured out what was wrong with me. And then the mental hygiene center. And then the Commission. And Ike, and the support group. And then I really was free. Free, but, without my self. Without being-- being who I am. Military. Psychological discharge. Not guilty by reason of mental reprogramming. A category intended for victims of rogue telepaths. For, for like what happened to Garibaldi. A decade of hanging around with Ike, for lack of any better leader, or anything better to do. When he started the FPFP I jumped in with both feet, thinking here at last was something that mattered. But it didn't get me what I really wanted. Which was to be something other than a used up old wreck. Unable to ever get a real job, because nobody wanted to hire the crazy lady. Living on a military pension that gave me just enough money for beer and monorail passes, and a quarter of a room shared with people who used my dishes and left them in the sink for me to clean if I wanted to use them. I tried to go home, for about a year. Nearly everybody treated me like fragile glass, except for mom and the other relatives who expected me to start being a 13 year old kid again. And the ones who treated me like shit and told me I shouldn't have broken, like it was some kind of choice. And that's probably way more than you wanted to know, isn't it?"

Khunnier's eyes were wide. "They really kicked you out of the military caste? That's horrible. And you couldn't even properly join the worker caste, because no one would give you a chance. There wasn't anyone else you could go to? Old friends from the military?"

"I killed them, Khunnier. I killed my whole unit. But that's the past. I'm here now. I'm military again. All I want now is the present, and the future."

"You killed—" A moment of wide-eyed, slack-jawed shock, and then Khunnier's voice dropped to a whisper. "In Valen's name. You're loribonded. That's the other thing Tifar was infamous for."

"Yes. You just keep that under your—" Minbari didn't wear hats—"bone, OK? I don't want pity. I just want to be a Ranger, like all the rest of you."

"This isn't pity. It's awe. That you could go through that and end up here."

"Oh. I never thought that story would make anyone admire me."

"I admire the strength you have. Inside, where it counts. I'm starting to see that the kind of strength that wins pull-up contests really doesn't count for much in the real world. And I'm really, really—surprised isn't the right word—Whatever it is in your heart that allows you to have Minbari friends—"

Then the lecturer called for attention.

"Well, thank you, Khunnier," Carla whispered, as the room quieted down. "That puts things in a different perspective."

\

The skies of Minbar never truly got as bright as the skies of Earth. Even on the clearest day, when the blue of the sky was a true cyan shade the like of which Earth has never seen.

Khunnier was glowing with excitement enough to compensate, though. He was actually bouncing in place a little. Because today was the infiltration exercise. Anything to do with spying always set his eyes to sparkling.

The class was assembled outside, without their uniform vests and pins. Everyone still favored the dark clothes they generally wore underneath, though. For hiding in shadows and being nondescript.

The instructor, a human, shook his head. "Is that your idea of civvies? You're supposed to pass for tourists. You look like a bunch of Rangers without their vests on. Now go back and try it again. I'm sure you all must have real civilian clothes in your closets. Or, in the case of those of you who came from the military caste, your non Ranger caste clothing. None of you has been here more than a year. We'll reassemble in one standard break. Go."

Carla went back to her room and opened the closet. There was one thing in there that certainly did not look like part of an Anla'shok uniform. It was blue and red, and very worn, and had a hole worn in the elbow from leaning on bars. Carla had thought about pitching it out when she came here, in token of her fresh start. But she had kept it for some reason.

"I've outrun my past," Carla murmured. "But it's still part of who I am." She put on the FPFP jacket and returned to the assembly area.

The others had turned out in a variety of outfits. The Minbari were about evenly divided between black military caste wear, gold religious caste robes, and various tasteful fashions. The humans, on the other hand, had universally gone for bright colors that clashed painfully with each other. One of them had even shown up in a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, thong sandals, sunglasses, and a still camera hanging around his neck. Carla had to smile when she saw her fellow humans.

But all the students were all staring at her.

"Well," said the human in the tourist costume. "That explains you."

Carla said, "I take it you know what the FPFP is."

Khunnier said, "It was the subject of one of those documentaries about Earth history that you always skip to go practice the Pike. There's no point in, um, I mean now that everybody knows…"

"Thank you for keeping my secret all this time, Khunnier."

"You're welcome. If I'm going to be an intelligence specialist, I not only need to learn to find out secrets, I need to learn to keep them 'under my bone'." Khunnier patted the top of his head to indicate his brain.

The two of them shared a smile at the in joke.

Carla addressed the group. "I spent a decade and a half trying to outgrow my past, wearing this jacket to various meetings and events. It didn't work. I didn't really outgrow it, and start looking forwards instead of back, until I came here, and joined the Anla'shok. I just wanted to stop looking back. But now that I've established myself as one of you, I guess I don't need to keep being a mystery to everybody."

Some of the humans started applauding, and the Minbari joined in. Carla smiled ironically and made of those politician-waves, to acknowledge the applause at her speech.

\

Space was vast and dark and infinite. The stars were steady; there was no atmosphere out here to make them twinkle. The Minbari fighter had no gravity, and Carla could have felt like she was floating in the amniotic sea of the womb of night… except that she was strapped in, of course. It would not do to have the pilot float away from the controls during combat.

Carla had never seen space like this before. She had been a ground-pounder, confined to views of space from portholes and viewscreens. She had seen simulations of the view out a cockpit, of course, while training on Minbar to fly a fighter. But she, Khunnier, Duar, and a human named Bojo were all on their first live flight.

They streamed away from the Whitestar toward a flashing space buoy the ship had dropped. They were simply supposed to circle it and return, an easy exercise.

They had been on the Whitestar for weeks, manning various posts, practicing in the simulator, holding Pike drills, meditating, sparring, and reading. It was much like training at the training base, except without the lectures.

The ship was deep in space now, away from the normal space lanes, far from any trouble. Or, it was supposed to be far from trouble.

A jump point formed right on top of the fighters.

Carla reversed her engines, realized she was going to plow right into the front of Khunnier's fighter, threw the stick at a random angle and veered off into space.

The ship that came out of the gate was an affront to her reason. Half boxy lines like an Earth ship, half impossible spider legs, all black and faintly shiny, reflecting blue fire from the bright geometry of the jump point.

It screamed in her mind as it passed by. Carla had the sensation of wind, and she sent her fighter into an uncontrolled tumble, trying to compensate for something that was only in her mind.

The alien ship lined up on the Whitestar and its weapons glowed as if preparing for an attack. Then it broke off, formed another jump point and zoomed through it.

The part of space it happened to pick to make its escape was the same area Carla's fighter had whirled into. Carla knew her fighter was going to impact the alien ship. The only choice she had was whether to stick or bounce off.

If she bounced off, and the rapidly expanding jump point took her into hyperspace, she might be lost there forever. Minbari fighters were short range, without hyperdrive.

With only a split second to make her decision, Carla set the claw and attached to the alien ship. The impact made a sickening crunch, but the fighter's hull integrity held, and the atmosphere remained inside where it belonged.

The red light of hyperspace flickered around her. She rode like a limpet to the alien base.

The End

The Dark Horse series continues in Evil Centauri Pirates


	3. Chapter 3

Evil Centauri Pirates

3rd in the Dark Horse series, which is a sequel to the Loribond series.

The trainees' fighters were scattered. Khunnier got his spinning fighter craft under control just in time to see his mothership follow the alien ship into hyperspace.

"Calm," he told himself. He had been drilled over and over in what to do if his fighter were stranded: enter a meditative state to conserve air.

Khunnier was religious caste. He had learned how to meditate before he learned how to read. But he found that it was no simple thing to calm his heart rate and breathing right after nearly having his fighter smashed to bits in a collision, and then seeing his Whitestar take off and leave him.

He heard Bojo's voice over the comm., coming out in a higher pitch than he had ever heard it. "Duar? Khunnier? Carla? You guys OK?"

Duar and Khunnier replied.

"Hey," Bojo said. "Carla? Carla?"

Khunnier keyed his comm. "I'm replaying sensor records to see where her ship ended up. We'll find her." Then in a moment, his voice came over the communications frequency again, much more subdued. "The unknown ship hit Carla's fighter. She's either clawed on or she's in hyperspace."

"If she's in hyperspace the Whitestar will find her," said Duar.

"There's something else," said Khunnier. "I replayed the sensor data from the beginning of the encounter. That ship came in oriented on the buoy."

"What does that mean?" asked Duar.

"It means that ship followed the buoy's broadcast out of hyperspace prepared to attack someone. Not us; it took off when it realized it was facing a Whitestar. It thought it was being signaled from its target. Whoever that was. A target with a homing beacon. Or a traitor onboard."

"That buoy is a commercial product," Bojo said. "Made on Earth."

"So it broadcasts on an Earth frequen—jump point forming!" Khunnier had never been happier to see a starship. "It's the Whitestar!"

The Whitestar's Captain's voice came to their three fighters. "Come on in, Rangers."

\

Reginald Sands, former Earth Force Marine officer, looked around the chatterbox in the window seat and saw the blue of Earth for the first time in over a decade. For a moment the color filled him with a welcome calm, but then the hammering of his heart returned. He would rather face another Minbari boarding party than go through with the confrontation he had set himself up for.

But he was committed now. He had chosen to seize his spectacular opportunity when it came. He had not realized until too late that Sheridan was not really part of the wargames, and somehow—Sands could not guess how—had genuinely been tortured. Which meant that when Sands had tantalized Sheridan with the promise of medical treatment in exchange for information, Sands had actually tortured him.

When the shuttle dropped into final descent, the nausea in Sands' gut had nothing to do with spacesickness. He had only meant to pretend to torture, for the camera. In a very narrowly targeted propaganda broadcast, aimed at his family.

Well, he had chosen his role, and now he was stuck with it. One thing he was not going to do, he decided, would be to pretend he thought it was right. If he played this right, his regret—his guilt—could even be made to serve as an excuse for an anti-Clarkist position. Yes, that was the way to handle his mother. Play on her sympathy. Or, well, no. Other peoples' mothers, perhaps, but not his. He had not seen her in person in a very long time, but he did not think she had softened in that time.

The shuttle landed. The limo pilot was there to meet him, to whisk him away on a private flitter to his family compound. The mansion was situated in the middle of the largest privately owned expanse of undeveloped land on Earth, in the sagebrush desert of what was once the American West.

The former Major straightened his clothes as if for inspection, braced himself, and walked inside as the help carried his bags. Reginald noted that they headed for the east wing, where the guest suites were. His old room had doubtless been turned into something else years ago.

He found his mother in the second parlor, in front of an anachronistically real fire in the wide stone fireplace. The place was just as he remembered it: plush furniture, tasteful bookshelves, original art on the walls. Nothing so common as a reproduction would be found anywhere in this mansion, even in the servants' quarters. Hundreds of years of accumulation ensured plenty of things for everyone. Things probably reproduced in the attic when no one was looking.

She looked much older than he remembered. She had her hair dyed a light brown, and her eyebrows too, and she appeared to have had her eyes and neck tucked, but she was not fooling anyone. Her eyes were steely grey enough for one body.

"Before you say anything," Reginald said, holding up a hand. "I have something to say. What I did was wrong. When I tried to tell you that terrible things were happening under Clark, you know I was telling you the truth. As much of the truth as I could. I'm glad he's gone and freedom has been restored. I'm glad we lost."

"I raised you better than that," said Melissa Sands.

"I didn't come home to get into a political argument. But I know how things were, and I know Sheridan. With all the political masks off, no rhetoric, no staged playacting, just the man. He was right and I was wrong."

"You tortured him."

"Yes I did. That's the kind of thing that happened. It wasn't just me, you know."

"You should have refused the order."

"What?"

"You heard me. I thought I raised you to know right from wrong. And to have the courage to stand up for it."

"But… I thought…"

"You thought what? You forgot I wasn't some country rube who can't the difference between his party and his party's man? That I would still be for Clark after everything that's come out? I kicked the shit off my boots a long time ago, boy. Sit down."

Reginald sank obediently into a green velvet chair. "It wasn't quite that simple," he said quietly, barely above the level of the popping of the fire.

His mother's voice came out softer this time. "I know, Reggie. We were all taken in. And Cedric and I were a lot closer to the corridors of power than you. We were in a better position to find out the real agenda. We had no idea what was really going on until we got to the truth behind the shipbuilding project. And that's something you still don't know."

Reginald sat up straight. "I want to know." This was better than he could have planned. He thought he would have to work on finding out about this for years before he would come to the heart of it, and now it was about to be handed to him.

"Good god, boy, you're quivering like a bird dog. Well, maybe I did raise you right after all. You could tell something stank, even without knowing any of the details, couldn't you?"

"Are we involved in pirate attacks?"

"That, I haven't been able to find out. But I see you noticed the same things I have."

"The Mesquite, the Creosote, the Rabbitbrush, and the Scrub Pine. All four of our oldest, least profitable ships of the Sagebrush class. None of our newer Ryolite class ships have been hit."

"If Cedric is behind it, he's been damned clever about it. But it wouldn't surprise me. Nobody can follow the pirate ships. Nobody can get a hyperdrive trace off of them. That's the Spiderdrive."

"The what?"

"I've been wondering how the hell I'm going to crack this nut. Now here you come. This is perfect. With what we just saw, if you keep your trap shut about your regrets, Cedric won't have any reason to think he can't bring you in on this. He knows I've been against his little projects since I found out about the aliens."

"What aliens?"

"The real dark heart of the Clark regime. It's not the Psy Corps like everybody thinks. No. No, boy, I got close enough to the centers of power to find out what was really going on. Now, before I go any farther, I have to know. Can I count on you?"

Reginald blew out his breath. "I didn't expect this at all. I didn't expect to find an ally in you. I knew you'd be against the pirates, but I thought you'd be on board with everything else."

"Hell no, Reggie. If I'm right, then it was Cedric's alien buddies who killed your grandfather."

"Killed? I thought he had a stroke."

"That's what the official report said. But I had a private autopsy done in secret. There was something physically attached to his brain. Something that killed him by being removed. Or removing itself. Whatever it was, it wasn't mechanical. It was biotechnology. Biotech with the same cellular structures as the Spiderdrive."

"What is the Spiderdrive?"

"Officially, it was reverse-engineered from an ancient ship found buried on Mars. That's what I thought too, until I found out about the alien. By accident, I think. Cedric was keeping it from me. But Clark's own men thought I already knew."

"What alien? What's going on, mother?"

"It was living in the Dome, with Clark. In some blocked off area. God only knows how it got out without being seen, but it showed up at the shipbuilding facility. Not the lunar one, the black project base out in the asteroid belt. I know it's still out there. I've tracked environmental supplies going out there. Odd things. Supposedly for some research project, but I can put two and two together."

"Well, what kind of alien is it?"

"I don't know. It was tall. Grey skin, what I could see of it. Bipedal, man-like. Well, demon-like, actually, with horns, but not like a Minbari."

"That doesn't sound familiar."

She shook her head. "I ran it by the computer. Discretely, of course. I didn't want Cedric to know I knew. It couldn't identify them."

"Well, maybe it's some kind of expert on that technology. An engineer, or an archeologist maybe."

"No, Reggie. It only fled to Cedric's black project base when Clark kicked the bucket. Don't you see it? I think Clark was obsessed with alien influence because he was being controlled by this alien. And resented it. And couldn't do anything about it."

Reginald pursed his lips in thought. "I thought you approved of Clark's anti-alien stance."

"I did. Before I knew the truth. I approved of a lot things before I knew the truth. Get one thing straight, boy. I didn't vote for Clark. I voted for Santiago."

"You told me you didn't believe the assassination story." 

"Reggie, we had that argument on an open comm.. Even if nobody intercepted it, it went through your military base computers before it got to you."

"What, surely you weren't afraid of Nightwatch. You're rich and powerful. The rich and powerful don't get disappeared. Not even under Clark. Not yet, anyway. Who knows what might have happened in ten years, or thirty years, but we weren't there yet."

"No, no, I was just watching out for the bottom line. Wex Shipping's friendship with Clark was good for business."

"Oh. OK."

"Now," she said with finality. "On to implementation." That was what she said in a board meeting when the what and why had been taken care of, and they were going on to the how.

Melissa Sands pressed a buzzer in her wrist comm., and ordered tea. Then she looked up at her second son. "When you were on that anti-piracy patrol, did you take the opportunity to make any friends you can trust?"

\

The pirate ship landed on a planetoid, sinking down on its spiky spider legs. The airfield looked like concrete, and the square buildings on its edge had the look of airlock doors and windows that did not open to the wind. The gravity was light. It felt close to the amount of gravity in the room she had occupied for only one day in downbelow on Babylon 5. That would place it at about .7 g's.

The ship's computer could tell her for sure, but Carla did not activate it. Sooner or later the ground crew would notice her fighter, but so far no one was on the landing field, and if she did not turn on any of her fighter's systems, she might remain unnoticed longer.

Her fighter's weapons would probably fire, but the only thing in her line of fire was the buildings. If there was no atmosphere out there, putting a hole in those buildings would severely limit the places she could reach with breathable air. It might only leave the pirate ship, which would probably be harder to enter than the ground facilities, since they looked like normal buildings, without armor—and without legs. The pirate ship felt vaguely alive, somehow. It gave her the creeps.

If she had been flying a human built fighter such as a Starfury, she would have been in an EVA suit. But then, if she had been in a Starfury, she would have had hyperdrive, and might not have made the decision to latch on to the pirate ship.

If she made it into the buildings, what would she do then? She had no assigned mission to accomplish.

There was no question of trying to fly out of here and get back her Whitestar, or to any civilized planet. She had no illusions that she could take over the pirate ship and fly it away. The pirates doubtless had guns, and all she had was a Minbari Fighting Pike clipped to her belt. And even if she managed to kill them all, she was barely trained as a fighter pilot, and had no hyperspace rating at all.

Try to find some kind of communications equipment and send a signal? To where? In the fighter, when she wanted to talk to the Whitestar, she just keyed the comm. She didn't need to know frequency and direction. But her fighter only had radio. Radio waves traveled at the speed of light, and that meant it would take years for a signal from her fighter to get anywhere. If the pirate base had stellarcom, she could call someone in real time from there. But she would need a comm code.

She did not know any stellarcom codes by heart. Years ago, when she had been a Marine, she had known stellarcom codes for her parents, old friends from Earth, and a variety of military buddies. But her parents had moved twice since then, she had drifted away from her old civilian friends before she ever reached Tifar, and her military friends had stopped talking to her when she was in the stockade. And after that, when she had followed Ike around to various FPFP events, she had never called anybody on stellarcom.

Carla shook her head. If she managed to win through to a comm shack, she would just try broadcasting on a variety of frequencies and she if she picked up anybody.

Some of the pirates exited the ship and walked to the buildings. They wore breather masks, like the stationers on Babylon 5 used when walking through the alien sector. But they were otherwise dressed in normal clothes. Well, normal for Centauri pirates. The hairstyles were unmistakable. They looked like Napolean hats made out of dark hair. The pirates were arrayed in a wild assortment of bright, rich cloth, jewels, body armor, bandoliers, and weaponry.

So, there was air out there, it just wasn't breathable. If she popped her fighter canopy, she would not be in hard vacuum.

That both simplified and complicated things. It upped her chances of making it to the buildings and finding some communications equipment. It also removed the possibility of killing herself with the push of button.

Carla did not want to space herself. But she did not want to be taken prisoner again, either.

She decided to be patient and wait for the ground crew to investigate. She could stay in the cockpit indefinitely, since she was siphoning air from the pirate ship. When someone came by, that someone would have a breather mask, which she would take.

She did not have to wait long. When three members of the maintenance team came around to look at the damage to the pirate ship, Carla closed her eyes and went limp, playing dead. They opened the canopy, and Carla held her breath until she felt someone touch her arm.

Then she opened her eyes and grabbed the Centauri's mask. She held it to her face with one hand and got her Pike in the other, and extended it right into the Centauri's gut.

The Centauri fell away from her and Carla jumped to the ground. The other two Centauri came for her, and she wheeled her Pike one-handed and knocked one in the head, and side-kicked the other one.

In the moment of time before the three pirates got within range again, Carla pulled the strap of the mask over her head and took her Pike in both hands.

The Centauri whose mask she had taken came at her with a wrench. She struck his arm, and he dropped it. She reversed and got the one she had hit in the head in the head again, and he fell onto the tarmac, unconscious. The third Centauri hung back, wary of her Pike.

She had to get them all before they thought to signal for help. With a fierce yell, muffled by the mask, Carla feinted at the maskless Centauri and then jabbed the other one in the throat.

He was going to be down for the count as soon as he ran out of air. Carla did not know enough about Centauri physiology to guess how long that would be.

The maskless one tried to catch the Pike in his hands, and succeeded just long enough to slip inside Carla's guard. Her wrestled for her mask.

The other Centauri circled around Carla and grabbed her arms from behind. Carla flip-kicked him in the nuts and he slackened his grip.

Carla knocked the maskless one in the back of the head with her Pike, and he fell. Then she planted the end of the Pike in front of her and pole-vaulted herself backwards, smashing the opponent behind her into the edge of the open fighter cockpit. He let go entirely, and Carla sidestepped and spun, cracking him in the side of the head with the Pike. He went down.

Carla started on the long run toward the buildings. At any moment she expected the door to open and someone to start shooting at her.

She reached the door and found it locked. She smashed the keypad with her Pike, but the door did not open. Several seconds passed.

Carla came to the side of the door and leaned against the building, breathing hard, wondering how much air there was in this mask. She waited for the door to open for what seemed like forever.

When it finally opened, a long gun came out first, followed by another masked Centauri.

Carla sprang, knocking the gun up with her Pike and then wheeling her metal staff around for a blow to the knees. The Centauri stumbled.

She followed up with a blow to the head, but hit the wall as she fought in the narrow doorway.

The Centauri scooped her legs out from under her and they wrestled on the ground, both trying to bring their overly long weapons to bear.

Carla retracted her Pike. Now it was barely longer than her hand, but was still made of steel. She hit her masked enemy in the side of the jaw.

He reared back and brought the PPG rifle around. Carla deflected the barrel, and the burst near-missed an inch from her ribs and caught her clothing on fire.

She screamed.

The rifle swung back in line.

The flames died out in the alien atmosphere.

The Centauri had a clean shot, right through her mask at her face. "Freeze, human."

Carla had only one thought: "They're not going to take me alive." She extended her Pike again, right at the pirate's gun hand.

Carla heard the crunch of breaking bone and the pirate dropped his rifle, swearing in Centauri.

Carla knocked him on the top of the head with her Pike, but he blinked off the blow.

He pulled her mask off. Carla wrestled for it, holding her breath. He punched her in the nose. Blood spurted in all directions, and rolled down the back of her throat.

She hawked and spat blood, and accidentally inhaled the planetoid's atmosphere. Everything wavered. Her lungs burned.

She got in one last blow with the Pike before her vision went dark.

\

The red flicker of hyperspace was like fire on the wall of a cave: it could represent either safety or danger, but either way, humans could not help but respond to it in with primitive feeling.

"Ship on the scanners," said Bojo. He was manning the sensor station on the Whitestar with a gold-robed regular crewman standing behind him, in case he got in over his head.

"Identify," ordered the captain.

"Earth Alliance warship." There was relief in Bojo's voice. Those boxy lines looked remarkably similar to the unknown enemy ship they were hunting. But the ship they had found did not have long black legs.

"Open a channel," the captain commanded. "Whitestar 43 to Earth Alliance vessel. Please identify yourself."

"This is Captain Susan Ivanova of the Medusa. We are on an exploration mission. You're a long way from Alliance space, Captain."

"Have you seen any other ships?"

"No. Not for weeks."

"Let's drop out of hyperspace and meet."

They met in deep space, far from any star systems. The Medusa hosted the meeting, as the larger ship with more room. When the Whitestar's Captain had relayed his observations on the meeting with the unknown ship, and allowed Khunnier to present his hypothesis about the enemy having been drawn to the buoy, and described the flying-brick-with-legs that had attacked them, Ivanova brought up a schematic on the conference room screen.

"Did it look something like this?"

"Yes! How did you get the plans for that ship? I've never seen anything like it."

"These plans were supplied to me by a friend working undercover. In fact, you just missed the courier. I actually have seen another ship recently, a Ranger courier ship. But I didn't want that recorded anywhere. To protect my source, you understand."

"Of course. May I presume these plans have been shared with the Rangers, then?"

"You may. And you might not have seen ships like this before, but I have. In the human civil war. Unfortunately, having these plans doesn't mean we can track them in hyperspace. We can sit on the beacon forever and they can simply go around."

"So it is Shadow technology."

"Yes. Shadow technology and Earth technology. Combined in the same way your Whitestar is a combination of Minbari and Vorlon technology."

"What about the command interfaces? Are they human or Shadow?"

"Human. Thank God. We won't need telepaths to beat them."

"How will we beat them, then?" asked the Whitestar captain, hoping Ivanova's study of the plans had already suggested a strategy to her.

"We have to find them first. And that means setting a trap for them. Until now I had no clue how to do that. But if they really are finding their targets by homing in on a signal like that of your buoy, then we can lure them to a battlefield of our choosing."

"And then the hunter becomes the hunted. We'll either wipe them out or teach them not to prey on shipping anymore. And not to trust the targeting signals their allies have been sending them."

Khunnier protested, "What about Carla? Aren't we going to try to rescue her?"

"We have no way of following those ships to their base," Ivanova said. "I'm sorry, young man."

The Whitestar's Captain said, "Khunnier, Carla is Anla'shok."

Khunnier nodded dispiritedly.

"Don't worry, young Ranger," Ivanova said. "Destroying the pirates is plan B. If we can, we'll try to take at least some of them alive. Find out where their base is, how many ships they've got, what's their relationship to Wex Shipping, how they fence their goods, that sort of thing."

The Whitestar captain said, "We may only get one shot at this. They might stop responding to the signal after the ambush. So we'd better make it count. I'm calling for as much backup as we can get."

"And a target," said Ivanova. "We have to make them latch onto a prize before we spring our trap, or they'll simply jump to hyperspace again."

"Sounds like a plan," said the Whitestar captain. "Where do we get a target?"

"Leave that to me," said Ivanova. "Just signal Ranger headquarters that I need them to send out another courier. A human who can take my message to Earth without attracting attention."

"You believe your ship's communications may be compromised," Khunnier concluded. "Because the enemy is involved with powerful people on Earth."

"Yes," said Ivanova. "You're way too smart for your own good, kid."

The Whitestar captain said, "My ship's communications and crew are beyond suspicion. The only humans onboard are Rangers. You can dispense with the inconvenience of sending a courier ship way out here. You will only need someone to go in person to see your contact on Earth."

"Yes. If we're lucky, the target he provides will look exactly like the kind of target they'll be expecting. An old junker from Wex Shipping."

\

Carla came awake coughing. The long hacking coughs made her feel like her chest was turning inside out. Her lungs screamed from the damage of the alien atmosphere. She felt vertigo, and nausea, and every cell in her body hurt from oxygen deprivation. Her vision swam, and there was something wrong with her heartbeat. And she felt like she was bathing with snakes.

It took a few seconds for her to connect the sensation of being covered with writhing serpents to the Centauri standing around her. A half dozen pirates with big Centauri hair stood in a circle around her as she lay on the floor in a room painted purple and gold. When she realized what the snakes were, she wished she had bounced off the enemy ship and gotten lost forever in hyperspace.

One of the Centauri was not participating. He was obviously trying to, though; all six were hanging loose. He swore in Centauri and picked up Carla's Pike. He extended it and chased off a few of his fellows to give himself room, and then he rammed her, bruising and tearing.

"Oh, God," Carla coughed, "not with my own Pike."

A gruff voice interrupted the pirates' fun. They cleared off, and two other Centauri approached, looking like they were there for business instead of pleasure.

The older one spoke again, and the younger Centauri stared at Carla. She felt like she was falling through clouds. Then the clouds ripped away.

Who sent you? Did you get a signal off? Do they know we're here? What was your ship doing in that part of space?

The questions came relentlessly, and Carla could not help but think of the answers. She thought she should try to resist, meditate perhaps, to blank out her mind. But she had never been very good at the meditative exercises taught to Ranger recruits. The Centauri telepath shredded her thoughts as soon as she tried to begin a meditation. And the coughing kept her from trying to get to that state of mind through control of her breath.

The interrogation was all over in minutes.

Then all the big haired Centauri left, and a shaven headed female of their species came in. "Humans are funny," she said with a smile and a glitter in her eye. "Telepathy is a neutral word in your language. It can be used for good or evil. But empathy—the ability to sense emotions—that's supposed to be all good. Why should a weaker version of telepathy be morally positive, if telepathy is neutral? Well, your people must never have met anyone like me. I am an empath, you see. But to me your fear is delicious."

Carla tried to get up and fight, but ended up curling up on herself coughing her lungs out.

The Centauri lady pirate laughed an evil laugh. "They never let me play with the crews of the captured ships. They send them all home safe, what a waste. But you, you're not part of the bargain. And nobody knows you're here."

The End

The Dark Horse series continues in Spiderdrive


	4. Chapter 4

Spiderdrive

Fourth in the Dark Horse series.

Commander Khyber settled into place in the maintenance shaft. He had brought a rollout pad in addition to the tools and handlight, since he anticipated a lengthy meeting. He jacked into the ship's security system at a junction point, where he could cover his tracks easily.

The Captain had cut him out of the loop. She had had multiple secret rendezvous with Rangers, and at the last one, a snatch of overheard conversation at the airlock implied she was taking tactical advice from a wet-behind-the-bone Minbari teenager. Instead of from Khyber, her first officer!

Now there was not one but three Whitestars hanging off the Medusa's bow, and all their command staffs were coming aboard for a conference. A meeting which, once again, did not include Khyber.

"That damned traitorous Jew is plotting something," Khyber muttered as he put in his earbud. From here, he could listen to the meeting without having to enter any room or use any computer. His eavesdropping would leave no traces.

"Of course, they're always plotting something. This ship should have been mine. It was Sheridan's mutinous fleet that killed Captain Pao. Did Earth reward me for my loyalty? No-o-o-o. They up and install that bitch Ivanova. The Voice of the Resistance! Next to Sheridan, she's the worst traitor of the lot. They cost us all our colonies, and killed thousands of people just like Pao and the others. And I don't believe for a second that President Clark killed himself."

Khyber finished his preparations and tried to relax on the rollout pad as he listened to footsteps and the swiveling sounds of bolted down station chairs. There was a general hum of low conversations which he could not make out, but that did not matter. It was likely just people introducing themselves to each other.

Whatever the traitor was planning now, he was going to catch her at it. Until Earth removed her, Khyber had to follow her orders. He always followed orders. That was what Earth Force officers and crewmen were supposed to do. Traitors like Ivanova and Sheridan wanted independence, fine, let them be independent where he could shoot them.

Well, Ivanova was his Captain, like it or not. Until he could prove she was betraying Earth again, he was stuck with her. But he swore if he ever got a shot at Sheridan he would take it.

The meeting began. At first, disappointingly, Ivanova was only talking about an anti-piracy action. Why that needed to be a big secret, he couldn't guess. The pirates' technology was disturbingly advanced, but why would Ivanova keep that away from him?

Khyber made a careful mental note of the targeting buoy frequency. The strategy seemed sound: lure the pirates with a fake target and then pounce on them. It was perfectly normal battle tactics. Something else had to be going on, too.

Ah. There was the connection. Wex Shipping. And Cedric Sands' newly announced candidacy for the Presidential nomination of the Regulationist Party. And Captain Ivanova's revelation of her mole at Cedric's elbow.

A masculine voice said, "Wait a minute. You're telling me that YOU put Major Sands up to – doing what he did?"

"Surely you were in on it," Ivanova said.

"No! I had no idea what was going on."

"But, the marks. Weren't they faked up for the broadcast?" 

"Sure as hell felt real from this end."

"My God, sir, he didn't really—where would Sands get baltor mar anyway?"

"No, no, Lennier did that."

"Lennier?" Now there was real disbelielf in her voice, not just protest.

"Long story. So, OK, Major Sands was looking for a spectacular opportunity to get in good with his evil Regulationist relatives, I fell into his lap, and he took advantage of it. I get that part. Let's move on. I actually came out here because of the report that the Drakh might be involved. Tell me more about that. Has Sands actually sighted one?"

"Not yet, sir, but he's amassed all kinds of evidence that there's one living out at the Wex experimental shipyard. He's working on getting out there to confirm a live sighting."

"Make that his top priority. We've got to nail those alien bastards."

Khyber wished he had recorded that. He had not planned to record anything, just in case a recording might be found, which would tip off his traitorous Captain. But when Ivanova had mentioned Sands' broadcast and the baltor mar, he had realized why the man's voice sounded familiar. It was that murdering rat bastard Sheridan.

After all the hay Sheridan and Ivanova had made of Clark's "anti-alien biases" in their Voice of the Resistance war propaganda, a recording of Sheridan saying 'we've got to nail those alien bastards' would have gotten back a few points for Earth's side.

On second thought, Khyber dismissed media posturing as irrelevant. A recording was not worth the risk. In the age of telepathic scan, Khyber's own memories were just as admissible in court as a recording. Ivanova's interference with Earth's electoral process was probably not criminal enough to get her command taken away from her, though; not when she could legitimately claim her actions were taken to prevent pirate attacks on Earth shipping.

Khyber would wait, and be patient, and catch Ivanova when she showed her true colors. But there was no need to wait to get Sheridan. Khyber collected his tools and slid out of the accessway. He stowed the rollout pad and most of the tools in the maintenance closet from which he had gotten them, stuffed the earbud into a pocket, and proceeded to the forward airlock.

Just as he had hoped, Sheridan's personnel pod was unguarded. He used a maintenance keycard to open the lock. No point in going to all this trouble only to give himself away by using his own security code. When he was done, he would wipe the card clean and put it back in the maintenance locker too.

Khyber grinned as he entered the pod and went to work.

\

Ivanova came onto the bridge after her long, mentally exhausting meeting, and flopped into the Captain's chair. She noticed her first officer, Commander Khyber, eying her oddly.

Well, that was to be expected. The truth was, she could not trust anyone on the Medusa when the origins of this pirate menace stretched back to Earth. She had not managed to form any friendships on her ship, except with Major Sands, who was back on Earth now. And the credit for that friendship belonged entirely to him, for his stark honesty at that fateful first private dinner.

Ivanova had started off her Captaincy on the wrong foot, distant and heartsick, and prone to running out on conversations for fear of getting weepy in public. She had not known she loved Marcus until he died. Then she finally got command of a starship, a goal she had been working towards for years, when she could barely function. She was determined to do a good job, but there was no getting back those crucial first few months. She had no rapport with her officers at all, and no way to assess which of them she could trust with the truth about the pirates. Any of them might have connections to the Wex/ Regulationist / Drakh / Shadow-technology conspiracy.

The ensign at the sensor station shrilled, "Captain! President Sheridan's shuttle is emitting target frequency!"

"What? Get me a channel."

"To the personnel pod?" asked the lieutenant at nav and comm.

"Yes, to the pod!"

"Channel open."

"John, you're broadcasting target signal!"

"Shutting down comm.!" Sheridan's voice came back, and then his channel closed. But the signal continued after Sheridan turned off his comm board.

A jump point opened so close to the Medusa that the bridge rippled in the hyperspace nimbus.

"Weapons live!" Ivanova snapped. "John, goose it!"

But the personnel pod did not speed up. Sheridan had shut down his communications.

One of the Whitestars started to maneuver, and another one opened fire into the jump point as soon as the black legged ship hove into view.

"Target that ship and fire!" Ivanova ordered. The Medusa and a second Whitestar joined their fire to that of the first Whitestar, while the third continued to lumber around into firing position from a dead stop.

As the jump point closed and the attacking vessel streaked in on the personnel pod, Ivanova felt the terrible shriek of a Shadow vessel rip through her mind. That was not the Earth-Shadow fusion they had been expecting! It was all pointy legs and terror. It was a Shadow ship.

The Shadow vessel scooped up the personnel pod like a tarantula gripping its prey.

"Tractor beam!" Ivanova ordered. "Get that pod back!"

"No lock!" called the ensign. "It's got a leg over it, and it's interfering somehow."

Now all the Whitestars were firing at the Shadow vessel, but targeting its back side, away from the captured pod. One of its spiky legs sheared off and tumbled in space.

Then a jump point opened and the Shadow vessel went through.

"After them!" Ivanova ordered, knowing it was futile. The Medusa could not track a Shadow vessel in hyperspace. Even the Whitestars couldn't do that, unless they could follow it closely enough to engage in hyper before it went off the beacon.

The Medusa and the Whitestars followed the Shadow vessel into jump, concentrating their fire at its rapidly retreating back. But then it slipped away from them. The Shadows had always had the advantage in hyperspace.

"What now?" commed one of the Whitestar captains.

"Now we stick to our plan," said Ivanova. "We have to draw them out. Take the pirate ship, or at least take some of its crew alive. We'll never get anything from a Shadow pilot, at least not without Lyta's help. But only God and G'Kar know where she is now. Destroy any genuine Shadow ships we see, like that one. Capture the human-Shadow fusion ships. That's all we can do."

That, and hope Reginald Sands might find out the location of the pirate base. But that, she was not saying on an open comm.

Nor was she about to say it to her bridge crew, or anyone else on the Medusa. The target signal did not come out of Sheridan's personnel pod by accident. There was a saboteur aboard the Medusa.

\

"Damn, I wish I had stellarcom in this thing." The planetoid steadily growing bigger on the viewscreen had to be the pirate base. Now he knew where it was, but he was hardly in a position to do anything about it. "Who designed this thing, anyway?"

He knew the answer to that: Minbari had designed the pod. Worker caste Minbari; they designed and built everything on Minbar. And the Whitestar fleet had originally been built in secret from the military caste, as Delenn's personal project. Built by the workers, crewed by the religious, commanded by humans and Rangers. Not a single military mind had anything to do with the design of the Whitestar or any of its systems, such as this pod. Which accounted for the lack of stellarcom; the workers designed this pod for insystem short-range use, and never anticipated anything like this happening.

To be fair, Sheridan had not seen it coming either. His view of the attack had been blocked by the other ships. One moment he was trying to shut off the signal, the next black spider legs wrapped around the pod and carried him off.

He had not gotten a very good look at the attacking ship, but it was easy to tell that it did not include any of the squared-off Earth designs of the pirate ship. This was a real Shadow vessel. And what did that imply? Nothing, necessarily.

He had already known that numerous Shadow servants survived the destruction of Zahadum. The Shadows themselves were gone, but their technology kept popping up all over the galaxy. It was possible the pirates could have scavenged a Shadow ship.

"Possible, but not likely," he said. "Not when they also have a Shadow-human fusion ship. The Drakh are probably behind this. Continuing the Shadows' work, creating chaos and conflict. They're not quite up to starting another war, so they work with pirates instead. Yes, that tracks."

The ship was coming in for a landing. "That's enough grand strategy," he told himself. "Immediate tactics, now. What are my resources? Me. Unarmed. In an unarmed ship. I don't think a frontal assault is the way to go."

He had to be realistic. He was either going to die or be taken prisoner. He had had a very painful lesson in what happens when he tried to fight overwhelming odds, by himself, unarmed. He kept flashing back to the bar on Mars.

Of course, he had been tranqed then. So, it was impossible to go up against a whole pirate base by himself, wasn't the impossible his specialty? If only he had a tac-nuke in his back pocket.

He saw the Shadow-human fusion ship on the airfield below, with scaffolding around it, undergoing repairs. A dented Minbari fighter lay nearby, apparently where it had been pulled off of the pirate ship's hull.

The Shadow vessel positioned his pod at the pirate ship's airlock. It made solid contact and latched on. He heard the pirate ship's lock door roll back. If he was going to try to jump the pirates, this would be his best opportunity.

The pod was not configured to give him any place to hide behind the door. When the airlock opened, he darted forward and came out swinging. He managed to connect his fist with a Centauri jaw before he found himself on the deck.

Pain; dizziness; a feeling of disconnection from his limbs. Light stun. He blinked up at the pirates and spotted the stunners they all carried, except for one with a deadly long rifle.

One of the Centauri hauled him to his feet, and pressed a stunner against the side of Sheridan's head. The other pirates searched the pod.

"Where is the treasure?" one of the pirates asked in heavily accented Centauri.

One of the others said, "Maybe he is the treasure."

The first one asked Sheridan, "If you are crew, give the word and tell us where the treasure is."

"Sorry," Sheridan said. He squelched his impulse to say 'sorry, fresh out'; he could indulge in flippancy when he got out of this. His week's sojourn on Mars had completely erased any temptation toward meaningless defiance. He would only resist when it counted. He said, "The signal must have gone off by mistake."

One of the other pirates said something in Centauri. Sheridan caught the words Wex and Whitestar.

"He is right," said the first pirate. "You give the word, yes? Then we know you are crew, yes?"

The pirate that sounded like Londo was looking for some kind of code word, Sheridan realized. Wex crewmen must be given code words to identify themselves to the pirates. The crews of the pirated Wex ships were in on it, then. That insight did not do him much good right then.

The pirates argued with each other in Centauri. Then they marched him through the ship, gave him a filter mask, and escorted him across the tarmac to the buildings. In the building airlock, he was briefly tempted to make another escape attempt as he took his mask off, because the Centauri had to take the stunner muzzle off of Sheridan's temple. But the other pirates were still covering him, with stunners and with the long gun.

This was not a particularly good escape opportunity. He would wait for a better one. Of course, there might not be a better one.

Escape, escape, escape: it was a litany running in his head. But this was not like Mars. He was not a military officer captured by the enemy. He was the President of the Interstellar Alliance, taken hostage by pirates. It was a completely different situation.

They took him to a sumptuous office, crammed with wooden furniture that would have been tasteful if there had been a little less of it, and if it had not been piled high with silk and velvet throw pillows and gold knickknacks.

Sheridan was given a comfortable seat, while the Centauri gabbled with each other in their own language. They grew quiet as another pair of Centauri came in, a young one and an old one.

The young one stood in front of Sheridan and stared at him. At first Sheridan thought it was some variation on a staring contest, but then he started to get a headache, and realized what must be happening. He was being scanned.

Normals could not tell when they were being telepathically scanned, unless it was deep scan. Then it could hurt, and even kill. The Centauri telepath was not just reading surface thoughts, then; he was deep scanning him.

Sheridan was not tied to the chair. He could attack to stop the scan.

As soon as the thought occurred to him, before he could even start bunching up his muscles to sprint out of the chair, the telepath called out something in Centauri, and the other pirates all pointed their weapons at Sheridan.

He sighed and abandoned his abortive escape attempt.

The telepath turned to the older Centauri and spoke to him.

The old pirate said, "So, you are the treasure. How much ransom should I ask for you, President Sheridan? I'm sure you're worth enough to buy several new ships. Ones that are less distinctive that those already provided for us."

"The Interstellar Alliance does not negotiate with terrorists," Sheridan said.

"Terrorists," the old Centauri chuckled. "Terrorists have political aims. We only want money."

A female Centauri came in, rubbing her hands in delight. "I hear you have another prisoner who is not part of the agreement."

"He's far too valuable for you to touch, Inoja. We're expecting ransom."

"Oh please, please, I promise I won't leave any marks. There are so very many fun things I could do with a matched set of humans."

Sheridan objected, "Now just wait a minute."

The old pirate grunted. "Alright, you can play, but don't hurt him. The last thing we need is a plague of vengeful IA forces hunting us through the galaxy."

Inoja flitted to the old pirate and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you, Uncle." Then she turned to the other pirates and said, "Bring him to the puppet theater."

This time Sheridan did not wait for a better opportunity, guns be damned. He leaped out of his seat and grabbed for the stunner of the nearest pirate. He would have preferred to go for the rifle, but the rifleman was out of reach.

Sheridan got the weapon away from the pirate, stunned him, and downed the rifleman before the world shorted out.

When he woke up in a dim room, his head pounding, he realized he had been hit with heavy stun, or possibly multiple stun blasts. There were heavy bands around him: biceps, forearms, hands; thighs, calves; a wide harness around his midsection, and a balaclava around his head and under his chin. Each part of the array was connected to a wire.

This was the puppet theater, he realized.

Inoja had a control device in her hands. She touched it, and Sheridan's right arm waved. "Hello," Inoja said in a deep voice, imitating Sheridan.

Then she touched the unit again, and a female form 'walked' across the floor of the puppet theater. "Hello," Inoja said again, in a tremulous high pitched squeak that sounded more like someone inhaling helium than any real female voice.

Inoja walked both of them toward each other until they were within four feet. The woman was about Sheridan's age, with light hair that might once have been blonde hanging lankly down. She was bruised and generally roughed up, dirty in places, recently cleaned off in others, and except for the puppet strings, naked.

In her own voice, Inoja said, "I don't know how you humans manage to mate at all. Look at you. You can't even reach her from there."

That was when Sheridan realized he was naked too. "Oh no."

"Sh!" the Centauri female commanded. She lowered her voice and said, "Hey baby, what's your sign?"

Then she pitched her voice up to its chipmunk-like soprano and said, "The sign says Authorized Personnel Only baby."

Sheridan struggled against the puppet strings. He could not get out of them.

Inoja deepened her voice and said, "Care to dance?" and then responded in her fake-female voice, "I thought you'd never ask, you handsome devil."

Inoja worked her control box and got her two humans into a waltz position, and started moving them around the floor. It was awkward at first, but Inoja got better at it after a few minutes.

Sheridan whispered to the human woman, "Are you OK?"

"I feel like I picked a bar fight with a dozen guys and then went home with a marginally compatible alien. Except I don't have a hangover, so I guess I'm doing alright."

Inoja stopped the dance. "So you are capable of witty repartee after all. You're just too daunted to direct any of it at me, is that it? Yes, I should have known."

Carla lowered her eyes to avoid Inoja's gaze.

"I see," said the Centauri woman. "I broke you too quickly. Or perhaps, you were already broken long ago. Yes, that's it, isn't it?"

Inoja moved closer to Carla and traced a finger up Carla's arm, where old, white scars were normally hidden by sleeves. "How did you get these scars? Have you been tortured before?"

Carla answered quietly, "I did that to myself."

"Scratch marks," Inoja murmured. "I would not have guessed what they were, except that the answer was suggested by the man's scars."

Sheridan's injuries from the Ritual of Endurance were all healed now, and most of the marks had faded. However, the distinctive V-shapes of the baltor mar would probably last forever. Because of the necrotic characteristics of the baltor mar, they interfered with healing, and their insertion points generally left permanent scars.

Inoja said, "You were tortured with the baltor mar, as he was. But they left you loose to scratch yourself into a bloody mess. Mmmm, what a marvelous sight you must have been." Inoja placed a hand over her own breast and sighed, gazing at Carla rapturously.

"You two really are a matched pair. You're perfect." She began maneuvering the control box again. "They say childbirth is a terribly painful ordeal for humans. Too bad he'll be long gone by then, ransomed for some pile of cash, but there's no reason I can't make you last, if I'm careful. I could make you last for years. And raise up your child as a slave."

Inoja completed her positioning of her two humans, and said, "Well, go on."

Sheridan said, "You can't make me co-operate with this."

"Oh, yes I can," the Centauri female said. She walked out of the lighted area, into the darkness of the room's edge, and returned with a metal probe with a button on one end.

Sheridan's eyes widened. "You don't know much about human males if you think threats will get you what you want."

"Ah, fear! That sweet delicate perfume! At last I have made you fear, human man. But you mistake me. This is not a threat. It's not even an instrument of torture. It's a medical device, in fact. Your people use these to collect genetic samples from corpses. Why you would want to sabotage your own evolution by breeding from the dead, I can't guess."

"No. No!" Sheridan grabbed the puppet strings leading to his hands and tried again to break them, but could not.

Carla hung quietly in the puppet suit, eyes down and to the side, not looking at either Inoja or Sheridan. She looked as if she had already tested the puppet strings and had given up.

"Don't do it," Sheridan said. "Anything you want, money, ships, weapons, I'll get it for you."

"This is what I want," said Inoja. "Besides, you're lying. Once you are ransomed, you won't have any reason to give us anything."

The pirate woman inserted the probe.

Sheridan shut his eyes tight and held his breath. He hoped he would pass out, like he had passed out during the Ritual. But not enough time passed for him to fall unconscious from holding his breath.

Inoja pressed the button. Electricity slammed into Sheridan. He heard himself cry out. And he was sickeningly aware that he had lost control of himself.

\

The sector was crawling with Whitestars. Their mission: find the pirates. Some of the Whitestars patrolled the space lanes, looking for the pirate ship. Others were searching likely star systems for the pirate base.

Each Whitestar was alone. The strategic tradeoff was volume for firepower: how much volume of space could be searched, versus massing enough firepower to take out a Shadow vessel if they encountered it again. But since the searchers were hoping to find the Shadow/human fusion ship or the base, and could not track a true Shadow vessel in hyperspace, Delenn had decided to go for volume.

There was one warship out here that was not participating in the search. That was the Medusa. Capt. Ivanova had locked it down tight and started an investigation into the sabotage of the pod.

She was in her office when her exec came in.

"Ma'am, permission to speak freely?"

"Granted."

"Captain, you've been at this for two days straight. This is turning into a witch hunt. Morale is at an all time low. How long are you going to keep beating the bushes for this saboteur of yours?"

"Until I find him, Mr. Khyber. And I don't like the implication that you think this is some kind of personal crusade. The safety of the Medusa is at stake. There is a saboteur aboard my ship, and I'm going to find him."

"The personnel pod could more easily have been rigged on the ship it came from. It was only here for a few hours. The window of opportunity on the other ship was much bigger. Also, the other ship's crew must have known about the target frequency for some time. Our crew only found out about it after you briefed us, after the pod was taken."

"The other ship's crew are Minbari. Why would they do this?"

"Why would ours?"

"Commander Khyber, I have no illusions about just what I walked into when I took command of this ship. I know the Captaincy was open because the previous Captain died in action against the allied fleet. As did other personnel from the Medusa, some of whom doubtless still have friends aboard. Placing me here was a political move, just like placing Lochley in command of Babylon 5 was a political move, both of them intended to send a message of unity. Look, we're all joining hands and singing kumbaya. That's how it's intended to play for the folks back home. But I know it isn't true. I know there's lingering resentment on both sides."

"And you don't think there could still be Minbari who hate Sheridan Starkiller?"

"That was a long time ago."

"Even humans have been known to hold a grudge that long. And Minbari live longer than we do. Maybe nearly two decades doesn't seem like that long to them."

Ivanova pursed her lips in thought. "You do have a point there, Mr. Khyber. Alright, I'm not going to abandon the additional safety precautions. But we can resume our patrol. Give the crew something to do besides eat their heads off."

"Thank you, Captain." Khyber sighed in relief. "I'll inform the crew." He had gotten away with it. And he would get that bitch Ivanova yet.

\

The Whitestar Fleet stood off in hyperspace, waiting for the signal to attack. The search had turned up nothing, and they had all gathered again for the trap. There was something flickering on the sensors, far off the beacon. It was probably the pirate ship coming to take the bait.

The near-derelict Wex Shipping merchant vessel made its slow way into the star system. It had been broadcasting target signal for nearly half an hour, and now it had just reached this blue-white star's cometary cluster.

The pirate ship appeared right where she was expected, in the heart of the ice cloud, where she had been lying doggo. She began a desultory run against the cargo ship. She stuck around just long enough for the Whitestar Fleet to arrive.

Then she turned tail and vanished into hyperspace. And at the same moment, dozens of jump points formed in crazy angles, coming from parts of hyperspace where only Shadow vessels could go.

Three Whitestars followed the pirate ship into hyperspace, hoping to track it back to its base or cripple and board it. The others turned to fight.

The Shadow attack did not last long, just long enough to delay most of the Fleet, and keep them from joining the pursuit of the Shadow/human fusion ship. Then they scattered and vanished.

From the viewing room in her Whitestar, Delenn watched the battle. She stood in the center of black space, and ships streaked all around her, firing, exploding, dying. One Whitestar wrecked against an icy comet with an iron core, sending glittery ice and living biotech parts breaking outward like sea spray.

"They knew we were here," she said aloud. "They knew it was a trap, and they trapped us in turn. They knew. They knew because John knew."

Sheridan had held out for a week on Mars. The pirates had had him for three days. Whatever they had done to him, Delenn swore she would take vengeance.

\

Inoja snapped off the recording of the battle. "Isn't it glorious?" she asked her humans. "Oh, I know, I know, those were your ships on the other side. But you set this up, Sheridan. It was your trap. We let our allies know, and they responded beautifully, didn't they? Ah… anger. So I can still provoke anger in you, how nice. I thought you were burned out of it after the last mating. Why don't you speak? I'm sure you could be very entertaining if you tried."

Sheridan and Carla were no longer in the puppet harnesses. Inoja had tired of that game. Now they were draped artfully across cushions in Inoja's richly decorated room, bound with cargo webbing into positions like a pair of faithful dogs curled up at the foot of Inoja's bed.

Neither of them bothered to struggle. Sheridan had tested the bonds and found them unbreakable. That was not surprising; the cargo webbing was meant to secure five ton pallet loads in the hold of a starship during maneuvering and reentry. It was the only completely undecorated, utilitarian thing in Inoja's sumptuous quarters.

"You're getting boring, you know, Sheridan. I was so excited when I found out who you are, after the first puppet show. I thought, surely he must be strong willed, and will be a delight to break. But you're just like Carla. You're compliant when it doesn't matter. When I say, sit here, drink this, hold still while I transfer you from one restraint position to another. But you still resist when I want you to do something you think is wrong, like mating with Carla. Someone taught you to be this way. Someone on Mars, perhaps? All the reports in the media say you did not break in captivity. But they were only half right, weren't they? You did not confess. But you did learn to submit. How I wish Uncle would let me carve you and pierce you. I'm sure I could take you the rest of the way, make your submission total, if only Uncle would allow me to sculpt you properly."

Inoja sighed, and settled down between her two humans in a rustle of silk, placing a hand on each. It began as a caress, and then she started to rake her nails across their backs. Then she stopped abruptly. "No marks, Uncle said. Not on you, anyway. But I like you as a matched pair. I won't start on the heavy play until you're gone."

Inoja's possessive fingers poked at her humans, claiming them both alike. The pirate woman invaded them, one hand to each human. "Well, now that the battle is over, no doubt they'll be making arrangements to ransom you. Ah, if only I had more time, and could bring all my arts to bear!" She sighed again. "At least I'll still have the female."

Inoja dropped her voice into her Sheridan-imitating bass register, and said, "I hate you, pirate bitch. But at least I know my greatest fear did not come about. I was always afraid I would enjoy this. But I don't. Even though the person doing it is a beautiful female."

Sheridan stared up at her wide-eyed.

Inoja laughed. "You forget, I am an empath. I cannot read your thoughts, but your feelings are an open book. Tee hee hee, that's what I call a penetrating analysis."

Then she pitched her voice up into her Carla-imitation. "I hate my submission. But I don't hate myself for it. Not anymore. And I'm surprised that I don't. This is a revelation."

Inoja returned her voice to her normal tone, and mused, "Yes, I will have to explore that further. Your state of mind reminds you of the obedience of the loribond, doesn't it? This state of submission had to be provoked in you before they ever gave you the drug. The drug merely cemented it, made it permanent. If you ever met your controller again, you would be helpless to resist his commands. You could be quite fascinating in your own right, Carla. But I'll have plenty of time to explore you. Sheridan will be out of my reach soon. I must think of something more I can do to him, without breaking my promise to Uncle."

Then Inoja pulled out her fingers and clapped her hands in delight. "I know! I will make you watch things done to the female. How delightful!"

The End

Dark Horse series continues in Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Brevari


	5. Chapter 5

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Brevari

5th in the Dark Horse series

The three Whitestars tracked the pirate ship as it careened through hyperspace, emerged in norm space to take detours through asteroid belts and whiplash around stars. The pirates were either desperately trying to throw off pursuit or they were engaged in a delaying action. The captains and crews of the Whitestars did not know which, until they emerged in an unremarkable system with a red giant star and a variety of burned, dead planets, and found the shadow fleet waiting for them.

They had been trapped again. First the Whitestar Fleet had been trapped at its own trap, then a few of the Whitestars had been pulled off and led here to be picked off by overwhelming force.

Normal captains would have scattered and regrouped. But these Whitestars were captained by Rangers. They attacked. Concentrating their fire, they destroyed a Shadow vessel.

The Shadow vessels were also concentrating their fire. They destroyed all three Whitestars. They ignored the fightercraft that managed to launch from one of the Whitestars as it blew apart. The Shadow pilots knew that Minbari fighters did not have hyperdrive, and with no one to pick them up, they were as good as dead.

The Shadow fleet swept off into hyperspace.

When he was sure the fighters were alone in space, Khunnier keyed the comm. "This is Khunnier, who's out here?"

He was greeted by one name, which he did not recognize, and one radio click.

"Duar? Bojo?" He thought a moment for the names of the more senior Rangers, and asked after them.

After a moment he got a response. A female voice replied in Minbari, "This is Ila, the medtech. It took me a minute to figure out how to use the radio. We're all ship's crew. The other Rangers were taken out by the first shot. We managed to get aboard the fighters after the damage control party restored atmosphere."

"So, who's the ranking officer?" Khunnier asked.

"You are. You are Anla'shok."

"Uh, alright then. There are no habitable planets in this system. Our only chance is to wait for rescue. You are all religious caste, so you know how to meditate. We will meditate to conserve air. Everyone shut down your engines and weapons to conserve power. Just leave on lifesupport, communications, and your distress beacon."

He was promptly greeted by a chorus asking how to shut off the weapons and where was the distress beacon.

Khunnier talked them through it, and they began the long wait. He did not hold out much hope that the rest of the Whitestar Fleet would find them in time. Not with the bizarre course they had followed to get here.

Just when his air was about to run out, a beeping noise pulled him out of meditation. A ship was hailing him. At first the squared off shape out the cockpit window made him think of the pirate ship, but it was battleship grey, not Shadow black.

He opened the frequency.

"This is Captain Susan Ivanova of the Earth Force cruiser Medusa to Minbari fighters. We are prepared to render assistance."

Khunnier responded, "This is Ranger Khunnier. Thank you, Captain! We are nearly out of air."

"I am launching two of my fighters to make room, so your five ships will all have berths to dock. After your men are aboard I will have to scuttle two of your fighters to bring my own two back aboard."

"Understood, Captain. Please prepare to tractor the other four fighters. I am the only rated pilot out here. The others are ship's crew using the fighters as life pods."

They got everyone aboard, treated minor wounds, and set up the Minbari in what had once been the Marines' barracks, and had been empty since Sands' contingent had left. Then they went looking for the Whitestar Fleet.

But they found the Shadow Fleet first.

\

"Look, Inoja! Look out the window."

Inoja peered through the triple paned plasteel. "Is that your new ship?"

"A beauty, isn't it? A brand new Wex Neon class star galleon with a Lancer Mark 5 engine. And it's all mine. Of course, it doesn't have any weapons yet. They make these in their civilian shipyard. But I can add them later. This ship looks like a thousand other ships. Nobody's going to blink when I set it down on some civilized world to fence our goods. You know, you're never going to get rich if you keep taking your shares in prisoners, and then killing them."

"I'll make Carla last. I've gotten much more experience now, Bardo. I know what I can and can't do to a human and expect them to recover. Besides, I'm bored with death. And anyway, you didn't get that ship with shares."

"True. It was a special reward, since we not only would not have known who our captive was without my powers, we certainly would not have known about the spy Reginald Sands. Cedric made us a present of this ship, for telling him the truth about his brother."

"And Uncle gave it to you. Well, that's only fair. I'm glad you and I aren't like that pair of siblings."

"Me too, little sister." Bardo gave Inoja a one-armed hug as they both gazed at the sleek, fast merchant ship. "And I'm glad I finally get to ship out on a normal ship that doesn't make me feel like I'm riding a nightmare. I hate Shadow ships, and the fusion ship isn't much better. It's not just the Shadow pilots. The tech itself is alive."

"I know. I feel it too. But I like it."

"That's because you're weird, Inoja."

\

From the inside, the Wex experimental shipyard in the Sol system asteroid belt did not look much different from the Wex commercial shipyard. It was just another windowless space facility, full of metal corridors. It had a higher ratio of office space to yard space, but the major difference was completely invisible: a boundary around the compound, defined only by space buoys, which warned unauthorized ships away due to a "navigational hazard".

Of course, randomly tumbling space rocks were a navigational hazard. The entire asteroid belt was a menace to inexperienced pilots. But the asteroids inside Wex's boundary were fitted with navigational rockets to keep them from smashing into the shipyard. And if someone without the proper codes tried to get within sight of the experimental shipyard, there would be a "tragic accident".

No one could name-drop to get past that kind of guard post. So ex-Major Sands had to worm his way into the facility by convincing his brother he was interested in a job in the family business.

Now he and Cedric were on a tour of the experimental shipyard. "So what position did you have in mind?" Cedric asked his brother.

"I was thinking military contracts. The sales end. My former career would be a great asset."

"Assuming I win the Presidency," Cedric replied, "and kick out those sniveling pro-alien types, there shouldn't be any problem with directing some procurement credits back toward our project. The damned super-Whitestar has edged us completely out of the cutting-edge market. We're thrown back on a few last fufillments of earlier designs, and we aren't getting renewed. It's the damn Sheridanites."

"Even if you don't win, all you need to do is make a good showing, get our presence acknowledged. Whoever does win will be forced to make compromises with our power base."

"That's third party strategy," Cedric objected.

"Come on, Cedric. It's too soon for the Regulationists to win again. The voters are still licking their wounds. You've got to know the reason the Party nominated you is because you're not a career politician. None of them wanted to rise to prominence while the Clark stink was still in the air. You're the Chernenko factor."

"The what?"

"Oh, that's Russian history. After Earthdome gave in to the Marsies and withdrew the Marines, I rode around in a warship for a while with a Russian captain. She was always talking about Russian history. There was a point in time just before the breakup of a Russian-based pan-Eurasian power into independent countries, where the old establishment and the rising new progressives in this one party agreed to disagree about who their leader ought to be, by putting in this old guy that everybody knew wouldn't last. Each group hoped their best shot would come next."

"So what happened?"

"Oh, the progressives got their guy in next. But that's not the point. The point is that somebody had to be the placeholder while all the infighting went on behind the scenes. They didn't have to worry about whether their guy would get elected; it was a one party system. But the principle applies."

"So I'm the placeholder? While the real politicians wait for a better moment. Yeah, I'm afraid you're probably right. I've thought of that myself, although I didn't really have a word for it. How did you get to know so much about politics, out fighting in the streets?"

"Political strategy and military strategy aren't really all that different."

"Here's our first stop. I thought you might like a look outside. The Spiderdrive ships are really something to see, from space. We'll go out in powered work suits."

"Sounds great!"

They suited up, checked power levels, air reserves, and so forth, tested the private suit to suit channel, and slid out the lock into the shipyard proper. A Spiderdrive ship was in the skeletal phase of construction.

Reginald and Cedric rocketed over to the superstructure.

"It's really something," Reginald Sands said. "Those legs practically look alive."

There was a burst of static as Cedric switched to the private suit-to-suit channel. "That Russian captain of yours. That would be Capt. Susan Ivanova, the damned Voice of the Resistance. Wouldn't it?"

Reginald turned away from the view of the Shadow/human fusion ship under construction. Warily, he replied, "Yes. She didn't know about my encounter with Sheridan on Mars."

"On Mars, hell," said Cedric. "Yeah, you had me fooled. Completely. And mom too, you little shit. Do you know how upset she was by that broadcast? But it was a trick. All along all you wanted was to get in here and meet the Drakh."

Reginald tried to fire his retrorockets to put some distance between himself and Cedric, but they did not work.

"Sorry, little brother. But I'm afraid there was a glitch in your suit's readings. A software problem, no doubt."

"What?" Reginald looked down at his powered work suit's display on his chest, and saw that the fuel was gone—and the battery that supplied power to the suit was nearly empty. If he tried to start a physical zero-g battle, he would exhaust it in one grab, and if he missed, then he would probably end up floating away, helpless to stop his drift without the rockets. With sick dread, Reginald checked the air supply. Empty. He had only what was already in his helmet.

He looked back up at his brother. "Why?"

"You came out here to betray me, little brother."

"No! I wanted to save you. You don't know what the Drakh are. What they can do. I can't stand by and let some alien control you."

"Nice try. But the Centauri telepath found out all about your little mission, straight from Sheridan's mind."

"And you believe a Centauri pirate before me? Your own brother? That…" his voice huffed out, and the next words came out slurred. "proves the aliens… are controlling you… tried to… save…"

The ex-Major's suited form drifted gently in space. With a puff of rockets, Cedric approached to hook a tow cable to his brother's body. When the clip touched Reginald's belt hook, the dead man opened his eyes. Playing dead was an old Marine trick.

Reginald grabbed Cedric's air tube and pulled it off. He kept his thumb firmly over the hole so the air from the tank would not escape. But the air did escape from Cedric's helmet, from the tube attachment hole.

Reginald did not look into Cedric's eyes, which he knew would be bulging. He had had to do it; it was self-defense. But it was a horrible thing to kill one's brother.

Cedric was not quite dead yet. He reached for Reginald's helmet, to apply the fantastic strength of the work suit to crushing it. But Reginald knew these suits well, and he was well trained in zero g combat. He grabbed for Cedric's rocket controls and fired the retros.

Cedric rocketed backwards toward the Spiderdrive ship. It was all Reginald could do to hold onto the air hose with one hand and the rocket controls with the other.

Cedric flailed away from his attack on Reginald's helmet to try to take back control of his own rockets, but he was too late. Reginald aimed him well and spitted him through the middle on the sharp end of a Spiderdrive leg. The claw came out the middle of Cedric's chest. It missed the heart, and horribly, Cedric was still not quite dead, despite losing air in his helmet earlier. But the air in rest of the suit explosively decompressed, spraying red and white crystal as the air and blood froze as it spewed into the cold of space.

Cedric's glassy-eyed stare reminded Reginald of a brown trout. The ex-Major's eyes stung as he thought of a time he had gone fishing on his family's land with his brother. But he choked back on his emotions. Crying in a space suit was a supremely bad idea.

Reginald attached the hose from Cedric air tank to his own helmet, and inhaled deeply as blessed oxygen filled his lungs.

What the hell was he going to do now? What was he going to tell their mother?

\

The Medusa faced the Shadow fleet. Some of the Shadow ships were in orbit of a rocky planet, and others were covering likely jump exit points.

"Calculate new jump angle," Ivanova commanded.

The comm officer said, "Captain! Receiving mayday from the surface."

"On speaker," said Ivanova in a clipped tone.

"—ony to Earth warship, help us! We are trying to evacuate under planetary bombardment. The enemy ships are destroying our transports! We are a civilian outpost, please, help!"

"Medusa to planet, continue evacuation, we'll cover you." Ivanova made the throat-cutting gesture at the comm officer, and he ended the transmission. "And God help us."

The Shadow ships broke orbit and converged on the Medusa. Ivanova took the warship into the planet's thin, bilious green atmosphere, interposing her ship between them and the small colony on the surface. The Shadow ships maneuvered and then slowed down, as if wondering if the apparently suicidal warship had a nasty surprise waiting for them.

"Captain," said Khunnier, who had been watching from the back of the bridge. "Request permission to take out the fighter squadron."

"Khunnier, I know you're supposed to be some kind of tactical genius, but just what exactly do you think you can do against Shadow vessels with a fighter squadron?"

"I asked myself, what would Valen do? We already know what Valen would do, in a delaying action to cover an evacuation from a planet, facing an unbeatable foe with technology we don't understand. He's already done it."

"You really have a way of encouraging people, Khunnier. Alright, so what would Valen do?"

"Hold the line."

" 'Hold the line'? That's a terrible reference for a Minbari to make to humans, you know."

"They don't teach us this in temple on Minbar, but if it's true what everybody out here in the wider galaxy says, that Valen was really Entilza Sinclair, then Valen fought in the Battle of the Line. On the side of the humans."

"Huh. You know, you're right. I hadn't thought of it that way. Are you a hyperspace pilot, Khunnier?"

"I've studied it. I haven't passed the exam yet."

"Consider this your final test, then. Don't go out in your own fighter, we won't have time to stop and pick you up when the civilian transports are clear. Take a Starfury. And you're junior in squadron, the regular Starfuy pilots all rank you."

"Thank you, Captain."

Khunnier and the human fighter pilots took up positions on the Medusa's flank. The Shadow vessels stood off, lining up their broadsides in preparation to attack. Khunnier figured they would probably start their run when the planet's transport ship took off, so they would not lose time breaking engagement to pursue it.

\

This was always an awkward moment: when one of the two prisoners was out of restraints, and could theoretically try an escape attempt. The thought of escape was never far from their thoughts during a transfer from one place or position to another. But the rising tension always alerted Inoja through her empathic gift. If one of her humans was about to try to overpower her, she always knew it a split second before they moved. Then she would jump back out of reach and stun her captive before he, or she, even got started.

But this time, when Inoja had Sheridan out of his bonds, she was distracted when the door flew open. "Inoja! We're evacuating. Bring him but leave everything behind!"

"What? N—"

Sheridan took advantage of the distraction to grab Inoja's stunner. He shot her at point blank range and she crumpled to the floor in a cloud of gold silk.

Bardo drew his own stunner and he and Sheridan fired together, dropping each other.

That only left Carla conscious, stretched out in Inoja's silk and velvet bed. There had never been a better time to escape, but she could not get out of her bonds. She pulled and jerked against them, but could barely move an inch.

She did not dare call out to wake Sheridan. Other pirates might hear her from the hallway. The door to the corridor was still open. If anyone looked in, they would see the unconscious people on the floor.

There was nothing she could do but wait for someone to wake up. And pray that Bardo's stunner was set at a lighter setting than Inoja's.

Carla's heart hammered in her chest as she heard someone stirring on the floor. Someone stood up. It was Sheridan!

"There is a God," Carla said.

Sheridan knew right where Inoja kept her keys. After everything she had done, and everything she had made him watch, he got no pleasure at all from rummaging for them in her cleavage. His only desire was to escape, he told himself. Well, he could hardly humiliate an unconscious person anyway.

He unlocked Carla. She wanted to spring up and dash away to fight pirates, but her spring was more of a stiff crawl. She could not suppress a groan as she tottered to her feet.

"Let's get their clothes," Carla said. She knelt by Inoja, who was starting to stir. Carla considered trying to bring Inoja along as a hostage to hijack the pirate ship. And then what? Hand her over to whatever court claimed her, if any?

Carla considered for about two seconds. Then she took Inoja's jaw in her hands and snapped her neck.

The cartilaginous crack was loud in the small room.

Sheridan glanced at Carla as he horsed Bardo's jacket off and put it on. It was not long enough. He stole Bardo's pants too. That left Bardo in his shirt and undershorts.

Carla could not squeeze into Inoja's dress. The pirate woman's slender form did not have the solid, muscular mass that Carla had developed over a lifetime as a Marine, a barfighter, and a Ranger.

Bardo started to wake up as Carla tore off part of Inoja's skirts and wrapped it around herself, tying it off at the shoulder. It wasn't perfect, but it would have to do.

Sheridan secured Bardo's hands with the same restraints with which Sheridan had lately been lashed to a chair. He pulled the Centauri to his feet and held the stunner to his head. "We're getting out of here," Sheridan said. "On your ship."

Carla picked up the other stunner. She swayed a little, dizzy from a combination of cold, lack of food, and Inoja's play, and steadied herself against the wall.

"Are you alright?" asked Sheridan.

"I'm, um, surprisingly OK. You?"

"I'm not sure."

Bardo came fully awake and saw that Inoja was still on the ground. "Inoja, wake up."

"Come on, move," Sheridan ordered gruffly, pushing at Bardo's temple with the stunner pistol.

Bardo stepped into the corridor in response to the gun, but he protested, "We can't leave my sister here. Uncle said the base has been found and we have to evacuate. He said he managed to delay the enemy with subterfuge, but it won't last. As soon as a ground party lands, they'll realize that this is a pirate base. Inoja can't be here then. Please! Let me carry my sister until she wakes up."

"Your sister's dead," Sheridan grated. "I only wish we'd had a few minutes to give her a taste of what she liked to dish out." Images of degradation, intimidation, and violation flashed through his mind.

The telepath read Sheridan's absolute sincerity. Bardo's face twisted, and he yelled and grabbed for the stunner.

The restraints fell away. Sheridan had been sure he tied them down. But Bardo was a telepath, and he could easily have planted that image in Sheridan's mind.

Sheridan stunned him again. As Bardo collapsed, Sheridan caught him and got a shoulder under him, to drag him along until he woke up again.

They turned a corner and came face to face with a pirate. Sheridan, encumbered by Bardo's dead weight, was not fast enough with his stunner.

Carla got her stunner in line first, but the shot fizzled out. It was out of power. She dropped it.

The Centauri drew a knife and went for Sheridan, who slewed Bardo's body around to use as a shield.

As the pirate went by, Carla had a perfect shot at the side of the Centauri's jaw. She stepped in and punched, bringing momentum to bear as she straightened her stance, exactly as she had done a hundred times before in bar fights. The Centauri dropped like a stone.

"Not bad," Sheridan said.

Carla picked up her fallen enemy's knife. "I wish I had my Pike back." Abruptly she remembered the last time she had seen her Minbari Fighting Pike. If she got it back, it might still have herself all over it. That thought was disgusting, but to her surprise, it was not crippling. She expected to curl up on herself inside, scream, cry, something. "Why am I OK?"

Sheridan peeked around the corner. "All clear."

They hustled down the corridor as Bardo started to twitch a little, waking up.

Carla said, "While I'm wishing, I'll wish for my old Marine issue PPG rifle."

"I wish for a nuclear bomb," Sheridan said. "Take care of the whole base at once."

"Here," Carla said. "Trade weapons. If we're going to use the telepath as a hostage, you need to be holding a deadly weapon."

"Right. Good idea," Sheridan said, as he took the knife and gave Carla the stun pistol. "A stunner isn't much of a threat."

They encountered a large group of pirates near the airlock, most of them carrying sacks or boxes. Only the ones who were putting on their breather masks did not have cargo in their hands.

Sheridan took them by surprise. "Everybody freeze! Or the telepath gets it."

Bardo was just awake enough to blink and get his feet under him.

Sheridan had Carla go around and collect all the pirates' weapons from their holsters. She netted a couple of PPG pistols, a pile of stunners—which she left on the floor—a bandolier of grenades, and a tripod mounted something or other that would serve well enough as a staff weapon until she got its firing mechanism figured out.

Sheridan took one of the PPGs. Then Sheridan got the whole party chivvied aboard the pirates' merchant ship. They locked the pirates in the hold. Carla stood guard in front of the door. She set up the tripod mounted weapon and started working on understanding its Centauri language control interfaces. She held one of the PPG pistols in a loose, comfortable grip.

Sheridan hauled the telepath off to the bridge.

When she was alone, Carla asked herself again, "Why am I OK? The first time I was a prisoner I was a wreck for a decade. Because I got revenge, or justice, or whatever it was when I killed Inoja? No, that can't be it. Somewhere on Minbar, the Minbari I knew only as Control is in prison for life."

She swiveled the long barrel with one hand, testing its range and responsiveness.

"Because this time it isn't going to ruin my life? Because my life is waiting for me, out there? Because this time I am Anla'shok."

When Sheridan and Bardo arrived on the bridge, there was one pirate already there, at the pilot's station, warming up the engines. He spun around in his station chair, drew a ray gun and shot from the hip. But the shot hit Bardo in the leg.

Sheridan returned fire with the Centauri-made PPG pistol and killed the pirate. He kicked the dead body out of the pilot's seat and plopped Bardo down in it. "Fly."

The Neon class merchanter rose into the night. The viewscreen showed an Earth Alliance warship and Starfuries in an atmosphere-skimming low orbit. But the ship was turned out facing space. Something dark and massive moved against the blackness. No, many somethings, some nearby, some farther away.

"The Shadow Fleet," Sheridan breathed.

Bardo took advantage of the moment's distraction to enter a sequence on the controls.

The ship's sugar-sweet voice announced, "Autopilot engaged. Running Program Two Seven."

"What did you do?" Sheridan demanded.

Bardo smiled and cackled. "This is a merchant ship. It's designed to run automatic programs to do nearly anything. And it's mine. I'm the Captain of this ship, and you'll never shut it down without my codes. You lost, human. I'll have revenge for my sister."

"What did you do?!" Sheridan roared. He grabbed Bardo by his peacock hair and smashed his face into the pilot's console.

A jump point formed in front of them and the merchanter transitioned smoothly into the hellish red glow of hyperspace.

Sheridan spun Bardo's pilot chair around and stuck the end of his PPG right between Bardo's eyes. "What does that program do?"

Bardo laughed again. "Go ahead. Kill me. We'll all be dead soon anyway."

Sheridan's eyes widened. "Commercial ships don't have autodestruct."

Bardo licked the blood from his lips. "Who needs it? There are a hundred ways to destroy a ship by accident, and every one of them can be duplicated, as long as you take the idiot-proof protocols off line."

There was a whistling sound on the bridge.

"But I don't have to destroy the ship. We're already off the beacon. In a few minutes, only a Spiderdrive ship can find us. I'll leave a legacy for my colleagues on the Shadow/human fusion ship. We'll all be dead by the time they find us."

Sheridan felt himself gasping, and there was a distinct chill breeze. "You're pumping out the air."

"Yes. A rather clever variation on a fire-suppression program. Getting cold in here, isn't it? Give me back my pants, I'm freezing my attributes."

"You're crazy."

"You murdered my sister," Bardo snarled.

"So you're going to join her? Is that it? You're a pirate, surely death is a normal business risk." 

"You think this is all about yo-ho-ho, as you humans say? Our allies have promised us that the Centauri Empire will rise again. They'll corrupt the Earth government until it poses no threat to us, and then they'll take us back to the stars. A great dream! A wonderful dream. But no good to me if I can't pass it along to my family!"

"The Drakh," Sheridan concluded. "You mean the Drakh."

Bardo struck like a snake. He grabbed the PPG, but instead of trying to get it away from Sheridan, he squeezed Sheridan's hand, and the PPG went off. Bardo died in a flash of red light.

Sheridan knew Bardo was right; he would never get the program stopped in time. He had to abandon ship. He raced from the bridge to collect Carla, keeping an eye out for life pods or pinnace docks on the way.

\

Carla gave up on trying to figure out the controls of the tripod mounted weapon. They were complicated, menu-driven, and she was pretty sure she had already locked it up by not entering the right security code.

So when a skinny pirate dropped out of the overhead ventilation shaft, Carla did not try to slew the big barrel around. She just shot him with the PPG.

But she heard a sound from an adjoining corridor, and suddenly the rest of the pirates boiled out of the hallway behind her. They were halfway up the corridor before she managed to turn around and start shooting. She dropped two of them, but then the rest were on her.

One of the pirates kicked her gun out of her hand.

Carla drew the knife and stabbed him in the gut.

Another pirate grabbed her knife hand, and one grabbed her around the arms and chest from behind, and a third got her knife away from her. She kicked two pirates at once, and instead of knocking them down, she knocked down the one behind her, who had not been prepared for the sudden push.

Carla bit his arm, but he did not let go.

The pirates still standing rushed her, and she kicked up at them. But they caught her legs.

Carla tried to pull a leg away to kick again, but found her muscles going weak as she labored to catch a breath. 'Fine time for a panic attack' she told herself. 'Fight, damn you.'

She twisted around and chomped down on the hand of the pirate on the ground beneath her, who let go with a yowl. Carla slapped the ground and jerked with her legs, and sent the two pirates holding her legs face-first into the corridor wall. She became aware of a sharp edge under her left hand, and picked the knife up again.

The pirate beneath her tried for a head lock, and she jabbed down below the left side of her torso and got him between the ribs. Carla stood up and stomped him in the groin for good measure.

The other pirates were running away, firing the PPG she had dropped wildly behind them in unaimed covering fire. With a berserker yell, Carla pounded after them. Her vision was going dark, but she chased them with a will. Her only thought now was of killing her enemies.

The pirates fled to the ship's cutter. Carla was right behind them. She got through the inner airlock door before it closed. Then she slashed one pirate's arm as he reached for her.

Carla heard the distinctive sound of a PPG preparing to fire, and wheeled around. She tried to kick the pistol out of his hand, and he shot her in the knee.

Carla went down screaming. But she was not out of the fight. As one of the Centauri launched the boat, a shockwave went through it, and the two standing pirates flailed their arms for balance.

Carla stabbed the gunman in the back of the knee and he fell, swearing in Centauri. He tried to shoot her, but she grabbed his gun hand and the shot went into his buddy with the bleeding arm. The body hit the deck with a whump.

The gunman fired again and the PPG burst splashed harmlessly into the ceiling. Carla slit his throat.

The pilot charged her and kicked her in the head. But he did not know enough about humans to hit the right spot to put her down.

Carla grabbed his pant leg and sliced through the back of his ankle. He buckled to one knee. Apparently Centauri had Achilles tendons too. His face looked curdled, but he was still fighting. He grabbed for the PPG in the dead man's hand.

Carla stabbed him in the chest, and felt the push and give as she pierced his left heart.

But Centauri have two hearts. He was still conscious. He got the gun, and Carla grappled for it. He fired it, and the shot hit the deck near Carla's face. Her hair caught on fire.

Carla stabbed up through his gut, seeking his other heart. Blood spurted all over her, and then his eyes glazed over and he fell.

Carla patted the fire out, and then rested for a moment, getting her breathing under control.

Carla extricated herself from the dead pirates and dragged herself to the pilot's station, and levered herself up into the chair. She did not want to look at her knee, for fear it might be completely gone.

The cutter was in hyperspace. It was running on autopilot.

This was a human-built ship, so theoretically she ought to be able to understand the controls. But she had not yet taken a rotation at hyperspace navigation.

"Computer," Carla gasped. "Emergency." Carla's voice sounded oddly flat in her ears. "Take us out of hyperspace."

"Unable to comply," said the computer's annoyingly over-enunciated customer-service voice.

"Why?"

"Current program does not call for exit from hyperspace until destination is reached."

"What destination?"

"Ishver 7."

"Where is that?"

"Ishver 7 is a Centauri colony."

"Computer, new destination: nearest world with emergency medical facilities."

"Are you declaring a medical emergency?"

"Yes."

"Changing course."

\

Sheridan ran down the corridor, and spotted a life pod door standing open. He noted the location and ran on, to reach Carla. His vision was going patchy from lack of oxygen.

But when he came around the corner of the corridor where she had been standing guard, he saw bodies on the ground, and a Centauri with a bleeding side was manning the tripod weapon.

Sheridan kicked off from the wall to get back behind the cover of the corridor he had come from as fast as possible.

The big gun's green death ray rebounded from the wall where Sheridan had been a moment before, and ricocheted around the corridor until it stopped in a dead body. There was no way out that way. He would just have to hope that Carla got to one of the other boats.

He snapped off a couple of shots down the corridor, to discourage the tripod gunner from coming after him, and then ran back to the open pod and got himself into the lifepod. He launched it, and it refilled with air.

The pod rocketed away from the ship into the vast empty flicker of hyperspace. Its beacon went on automatically.

Sheridan took a deep breath of the life pod's standard human air mix. He spotted the pinnace jetting away from the merchantman, and hoped Carla was onboard. He looked for a communications panel, but this was a civilian life pod. It was designed with panicked freighter crewmen in mind, and had no control surfaces at all. All he could do was float in space and wait to be rescued.

\

Ivanova saw a single unarmed freighter lift from the planet. She contacted the ground station which had issued the distress call, but no one was there. "Their evacuation must be complete," Ivanova concluded.

She waited until the civilian ship jumped to hyperspace. Then she commed her fighters. "All Starfuries, disengage. Form up on me and jump." The miniature Battle of the Line outside abruptly changed as the fighters and the Medusa broke off, and only the Shadow ships were still firing.

They jumped to hyperspace. Ivanova issued the command to recall the fighters, and they docked with their mothership while in hyperspace.

"Captain, we're receiving a life pod beacon. Earth civilian style."

"Recover the pod."

When it was safely locked on to the Medusa's passenger airlock, Ivanova ordered the ship to boost for their assigned patrol corridor. Then she went down to the lock just in time to see Sheridan come out of the life pod, dressed like a Centauri pirate.

The gold silk jacket, worn open over a bare chest, was trimmed in white in a distinctly Centauri style, and boasted a bigger brooch than even Londo would have found tasteful. Sheridan had a Centauri pistol shoved into the waistband of the matching gold silk pants. Combined with the nautical beard, he lacked only a pair of black boots to complete the piratical effect.

"Natty look, sir."

"Susan. Am I glad to see you."

The End

The Dark Horse series continues in The Sheridan Maneuver


	6. Chapter 6

The Sheridan Maneuver

6th in the Dark Horse series

Reginald Sands thought about leaving his brother's body impaled on the claw of the spider leg. But Cedric's work suit had the only working jets. He had to ride the corpse back to the airlock.

He stashed the body in the work suit closet, sealed up in the suit. He shucked out of his own work suit, but left the insulated under-suit on, along with the cap and neckpiece that went under the helmet. This way, with his military haircut obscured, he looked an awful lot like Cedric.

That might give him a few crucial seconds when he found the Drakh.

"No, wait," he told himself. "I don't have to confront the Drakh in person. All I have to do is confirm that it's here."

He knew the Drakh was hidden from the security monitors. But its specialized environment had to be controlled from somewhere. He found the life systems complex, sat down at a terminal, and began his search.

"Bingo. Alien respiration. I have you now."

Reginald looked beyond the readouts for the environmental controls, looking now at the alien food and environmental supplies: manifests, waybills, orders. He was looking to see how many Drakh were here, by estimating how long it took to run out of its supplies.

But something did not make sense. The Drakh had to eat; it had a mouth. But if the Drakh were approximately the size of a human, like most other sentient species of the galaxy, then there were thousands of them up here. Millions. Could there even be millions of Drakh in the galaxy? The amounts of alien nutrient solution ingredients brought into the shipyard were measured in the tons.

Reginald knew that the area set aside for the Drakh he knew about could not support more than a few Drakh, in size or in environmental supplies. He looked for another area with the same alien environment, and did not find it.

Then he started looking for any blocked off areas, any places with power feeds where the security monitors would not show him a picture. There it was. The ingredients were being combined into alien nutrient solution and piped outside. Piped into an area of hard vacuum.

Reginald shut down the computer terminal and went out to take a look at the pipe. He did not try to make his way through the multiple layers of security between the regular shipyard and the secret areas. Instead he got another powered worksuit and went around the outside, out in space.

He came around to the dark pit of the asteroid, and at first did not know what he was looking at. There were dark shapes in the darkness. Then he turned on the work light on his suit's helmet, and gasped at what he saw.

Shadow vessels.

Row on row of them, the ones near the end large and complete looking, those in the middle smaller but beginning to take on the familiar multi-legged shape, the ones nearest to him still apparently in the larval phase.

The alien nutrient solution was not ingredients; it was components. Shadow vessels were not built. They were grown.

Each Shadow vessel in the pit was nursing on its own individual pipe, connected to the main pipe. Each one had a metal wheel shutoff valve control, which looked bizarrely archaic next to the Shadow biotechnology.

There was also a long pipe reaching up into space, with a bar and very large wheel. Reginald could easily see what it was for. The bar was a grappling space for a Shadow vessel to come in for a landing, and the large wheel was meant to be turned by the Shadow ship's legs.

"Refueling depot," Reginald said out loud. Shadow vessels were grown here, and they were apparently refueled and maintained here too. The asteroid belt was not that far off the Earth jump gate's beacon. They must take off and land at crazy angles to avoid being seen in Earth local hyperspace.

Reginald had the knowledge he had come here for.

He knew the Drakh was at the experimental shipyard. The fusion ship, and all the Shadow technology Wex possessed was out here too.

And Shadow vessels. He had never imagined that. These ships must not be allowed to mature and leave the nest. He had to destroy them.

He could destroy the whole shipyard. All he had to do was be willing to sacrifice the people who worked on it. His own company's employees; family retainers, almost, in a sense.

"Yes," he told himself, "but they knew what they were working on. They knew it was Shadow technology. Some of them probably even knew the Drakh was here." He realized he was thinking of them in the past tense already, and knew then that his decision was made.

Reginald left the secret ship nursery, got back inside and took off the powered worksuit. Then he went to the third most restricted area in the base, next to the Drakh's quarters and the construction docks. It was near the skin of the asteroid around which the shipyard had been built, not deep in its bowels as some might imagine the heart of power belonged. This way it was easier to vent to space if it became unstable and needed to be jettisoned.

It was as big as seven warships stacked end to end: the Pile.

Reginald used override codes supplied by his mother, the Chairman of the Board. Even the engineers didn't have these. This was not what she had supplied them for. The original plan was just to hack into the computer system and get evidence of the Drakh's involvement. Enough to discredit Cedric, and counteract his power base in the company, so that he could be forcibly retired. But now Cedric was dead.

Reginald started by deactivating the alarms.

He hesitated over the timing. Give himself too short a time, and he would never make it away from the shipyard before it blew. Set the timer for too long, and the Drakh might discover his plans and stop the countdown.

Reginald decided on a half an hour, as a compromise. Then he shut off the computer screen, and simply walked away. He left the Wex experimental shipyard in the same shuttle he and Cedric had arrived in, which had the key codes for the boundary already programmed.

He had just cleared the asteroid field when the shipyard exploded like a nova flare. The EM pulse fried the shuttle's computer, even though it had shielded circuitry.

Reginald drifted in space for hours until a commercial commuter flight spotted him, and an insystem patrol boat took him in tow. He had a long time to think about what he had done. About the lives he had sacrificed.

But he had been a Marine major. He was no stranger to death, and to hard decisions. And he had been assigned to anti-terror on Mars, where the civilian deaths often outnumbered the military casualties on both sides. And one thing he had learned was not to second guess himself.

So he grieved, but he did not revisit his decision. Whether or not it was right to blow up the whole base to get one Drakh, one Shadow servant, it was done now. And he had done much more than kill a Drakh. He had destroyed everything it had been working for.

\

Delenn woke up when a Whitestar crew woman tapped politely on her sleeping platform. "We have a transmission from the Medusa. Captain Ivanova says, Captain's compliments and she found something that belongs to you."

Delenn slid off the tilted sleeping platform and came to the bridge. When the screen came to life, she saw Sheridan, in his pirated pirate wear.

"John! Are you alright?"

"Not a scratch."

Delenn took in the details of his attire. Particularly the open jacket and the slightly too small trousers. She smiled wickedly. "Tight pants are a good look for you. Turn around and let me see the other side."

"Delenn! I'm on the bridge."

Delenn's eyes twinkled, but she suppressed whatever retort she had been thinking of making. She and her soul mate could both be people of cruel humor sometimes, but Delenn knew when to back off. His 'not a scratch' comment sounded far too much like his claim that 'it wasn't really that bad' after his rescue from captivity on Mars. Sheridan possessed the flaw of hiding his pain, like a wounded Earth lion.

Delenn turned to business. "We will meet up with the Medusa and bring you aboard."

"In a fighter this time," Sheridan said.

\

The computer set the pinnace down on an airfield. Carla knew it was not a large spaceport because she did not hear any other ships landing or taking off. She was on the floor with the dead bodies, and did not even try to get back into the pilot's chair for the landing.

During the flight, she had taken off the ripped fabric toga and used it to bind up her knee wound. She had then covered herself with a long purple shirt belonging to one of the dead Centauri.

The ship's boat shut itself down. Carla pulled herself across the floor to the exit, wishing more than ever for her Pike. If she had her Minbari Fighting Pike, she could use it as a walking staff. She could walk however far she had to walk to reach medical help. But without it, she was going to have to drag herself across the ground.

Her knee was probably going to need to be replaced.

Carla was just trying to get the door open when it opened, and two Minbari knelt down by her. One of them asked, "What is your medical emergency?" in English.

Carla pointed to her knee. The medtech pulled out a scanner and began assessing her injuries.

The other Minbari went into the ship and checked the dead Centauri.

There was a scent in the air of this planet, sweet and full of old pain. At first Carla did not recognize it, she only reacted to it. She had always found that smell pleasant, one of the few pleasures she had in a world of torment. It was some flower blooming, beyond the airfield. It was spring on Tifar.

As she was put on a stretcher and carried outside, Carla looked up into the sky. It was a blue sky, full of oxygen. Almost Earthlike. There was even a yellow-white star high in the sky. It could have been a hundred different worlds. Except for the scent of that nameless flower. A wildflower that grew nowhere else in the universe.

Carla clutched the sleeve of the medtech and asked in Coastline-accented Minbari, "What planet am I on?"

Startled, he responded in Minbari. "You will be alright. You're being taken to a hospital."

Her pinnace had drawn a crowd. Local security forces were keeping it back. Nearly all the people in the crowd were Minbari, but there was also a knot of humans near the front, with floating cameras. It was an ISN crew.

One of the cameras hovered near Carla as she was loaded aboard an air ambulance. Another camera zipped into the boat to get vid of the dead pirates.

Carla ignored the camera. She just wanted to know where she was. "What planet is this?" she demanded in Minbari. "I know that smell! I know that flower! What is everybody doing here? I thought this world had been abandoned."

"This is far too nice a world to abandon just because the military base was closed," said the second medtech.

The first one said, "Don't upset her. Can't you hear her accent?"

"It is," Carla said. "It is Tifar. Isn't it?"

"You're going to be alright," repeated the first medtech. "What happened?"

"Of all the planets in the galaxy, why did the computer have to pick this one?" Carla asked, this time in English. That was not really directed at the medtechs.

The English-speaking medtech switched to Carla's language. "What happened?"

"Pirates," Carla said.

The floating camera tried to get inside the air ambulance, and the second medtech grabbed it and pitched it outside. There was a struggle at the door as he tried to close it and the camera kept trying to get in.

"I will have an investigator come speak with you at the hospital," said the English speaking medtech.

"No. This is an Anla'shok matter. We will handle it ourselves."

"We? You are a Ranger?"

At Carla's nod, the first medtech visibly relaxed. He switched back to Minbari, and no longer sounded like he was afraid he would set her off like one of the grenades she had left inside the pinnace. "I will notify them."

But the second medtech exclaimed, "Anla'shok? This is why there should be no female Anla'shok!"

"If you think males can't be raped then you haven't met these pirates!" Carla shrilled. She started to say more, then noticed the ISN floating camera. "Get that damned camera out of here!"

The second medtech won his wrestling match with the camera and got the door closed. The ambulance lifted off as the first medtech spoke into a communications panel on the wall. "Get a female doctor. Well, wake her up then!"

\

Commander Khyber did not know what the galaxy was coming to. The Medusa had hooked up with the Whitestar Fleet, and instead of getting rid of the Minbari quartered down where the Marines used to be, they were picking up another one.

Aliens everywhere. It was that damned unkillable Sheridan. Khyber had barely controlled his rage when Sheridan had come back onboard. He had tried to think of another way to get at him, before Sheridan transferred back off the Medusa to the Minbari ships, but had come up empty. There had to be something he could still do, in the upcoming Whitestar versus Shadow vessel battle. There had to be some way to get rid of both Sheridan and Ivanova.

There was that new Minbari they were bringing aboard. Maybe that was the opportunity. Maybe he could find some way to kill Ivanova and blame the Minbari, and then he would be the Captain, and he could figure out how to take another shot at Sheridan.

The new Minbari slowed as he was about to pass, and grabbed him by the arm.

"Your thoughts," the alien said. "You were shouting. Boiling."

"Telepath!" Khyber exclaimed. It all clicked into place. The new Minbari was there for the battle against the Shadow vessels. Of course he was a telepath.

Khyber pulled his sidearm, but the telepath knew he was going to do it before he did. The Minbari was already reacting before the PPG cleared its holster. Despite the Minbari's unimpressive stature, he was fiendishly strong. He got the gun away from Khyber and threw it down the corridor.

Some crewmen saw them struggling and rushed up.

"The alien's gone crazy!" Khyber shouted. "Help me!"

"He's the one who sabotaged Sheridan's pod!" the telepath yelled.

The crewmen pulled them away from each other. Then they let go as the two stopped fighting.

"Arrest that Minbari," Khyber ordered. "This is an unprovoked assault, clearly an attempt to divide us. I gave you an order!"

One of the crewmen put his hand on the telepath's arm. "Come along, we'll sort this out later."

"Your nickname is Tutti," said the telepath. "And you hope I'm right about Khyber so that the safety patrols will be cancelled and you can check the still you have set up in the access tube off Main Engineering."

The crewman let go. "Jeez. Aren't you telepaths supposed to try to avoid scanning people?"

The Minbari gestured to his gold religious caste robe. "Does this look like a Psi Corps uniform to you?"

"Oh. You guys have different rules. Of course you do."

"He's just showing off," Khyber said. "To make his accusation look better. Now arrest him. I'm still your superior officer."

"We'll let the Captain sort this out."

The whole party ended up in Security. Captain Ivanova listened to the evidence. Then she sighed and shook her head, perhaps in sadness, perhaps only in regret that she did not realize what a time bomb was ticking in her command. Khyber remained in the brig until he could be turned over to a military court.

\

Technically, Whitestars did not have a lounge. They had an observation gallery. It was really just a room with a view screen, and of course, being of Minbari design, it had no seating. Normally the Minbari kept the view screen set on a view of the space around the ship, as if it were a window. But this ship's one human crewmember, a Ranger training for his own command, was watching ISN and munching on something when Sheridan came in.

Sheridan gravitated to the screen. He wondered what it would be like to be the only human in a Minbari crew. He imagined he was probably going to find out, when the new capitol of the IA was ready and he moved to Minbar.

Khunnier was watching the broadcast, too. He had transferred aboard from the Medusa along with the rest of the Minbari and their two surviving fighters.

On the viewscreen, the Inter Stellar News anchor sat in front of another viewscreen, so that the background could change depending on what story he was reporting. Now his background shifted to a quartered screen, showing a small ship landing, an interior shot of the ship with dead Centauri on the deck, a human being carried on a stretcher by two Minbari, and an outline of a human head and shoulders with a question mark.

The ISN newsman read off, "And now an update on the brutal rape of a female Ranger, allegedly by Centauri pirates. Local officials here on Tifar say DNA typing of the evidence indicate a human is also involved. However, the victim refuses to co-operate with the local authorities, claiming jurisdiction in the name of the Anla'shok."

Sheridan smiled. "It's Carla. She's alive. She made it!"

"They haven't said her name yet," Khunnier temporized. He had not known about the details of Carla's captivity by the pirates.

"They won't. It's a human thing."

The ISN reporter continued, "Since she spoke freely to her rescuers about the Centauri she had killed in self defense, that begs the question, who is she protecting? Who is the mystery man? Anyone with information is encouraged to come forward. We go to our analyst on alien legal matters, James Wu. James?"

"Thank you, Dan. The local police on Tifar are overreaching themselves. The crime did not happen on their planet, and the victim stated that she had no intention of going to Tifar, the computer in her lifeboat chose it as the closest available planet with a hospital. Also, even if it were a local crime, the Anla'shok do have precedence over the local security forces of any member world of the Interstellar Alliance. So if she wants to go after the pirates herself, she does have the right to do so. Dan?"

The news went on to another story.

"Tifar," Khunnier said. "What a nightmare, for her to end up back there."

"Back?" Sheridan asked. "Oh."

"Sir, as soon as the battle is over, may I go to her? I wish I could bring her her things, but since our ship was destroyed, all her things went with it."

"Actually, I think you should go now," Sheridan said. "I would go myself, if we were facing normal pirate ships. But we're not, and I have to be here to fight the Shadow vessels. Bring her a uniform and a Pike. She lost both on the pirate base."

"Thank you, sir. In what ship shall I go?"

"I can't spare a Whitestar. Take one of the Medusa's Starfuries. I'll square it with Ivanova."

\

Space was essentially empty. There was very little in it that could reasonably be called terrain. When space fleets battled, there were two basic choices of where to fight: in a solar system or not.

Star systems presented many opportunities. Some had planets. Some had planets with moons. Some had comets, or asteroids, even additional stars. Old red giants simmered balefully in the hearts of systems full of cinders which may once have been planets full of life. Young, hot blue-white star clusters hung in the cauls of their birth, veiled with nebulae. There were pulsars, there were white and red dwarfs, there were novae and black holes.

And there was the vast nothing all around them. How was he to find the enemy in all that nothing? To vector in on a few shadows in the endless darkness? Just finding the enemy was not really good enough. If he simply dropped in on them wherever he found them, the two fleets would form up battle lines and pound each other with broadsides. He had a good chance of winning a battle with numerical equality, since he had the telepaths on the Whitestars now, just like during the Shadow War. But there would still be terrible losses.

At least he knew where the Shadow vessels had come from, and that their shipyard was gone. 'Where are they all coming from?' had been one of the most important questions facing the Whitestar Fleet, until Reginald Sands' report had come in via the Rangers.

More horribly, Sheridan knew now where the Shadow pilots had come from too. They were Wex Shipping employees who had either stumbled on or been brought in on the knowledge that Cedric Sands was working for the Drakh, and who had refused to go along with the conspiracy. So they had been 'disappeared', to a more permanent oubliette than the Nightwatch ever 'disappeared' anyone. The disappearances had conveniently been blamed on Clarkist excesses, even while Cedric had planned to bring back the Nightwatch if he had managed to get elected.

None of which got Sheridan any closer to figuring out how to engage the new Shadow Fleet. But at least he could be confident the enemy fleet was not growing larger as he dithered. At least, not from the Wex Shipping experimental shipyard. There could still be other Shadow vessel nurseries elsewhere.

It had been relatively simple to bring the pirate ship to a battlefield of his choosing. The question, 'What do they want?' had been easily answered: they wanted whatever was broadcasting the target signal, in accordance with their arrangement with Cedric Sands.

But now the pirate ship was an afterthought, to be cleaned up later. It was the new Shadow Fleet that concerned him.

What did they want? They were not being directed by the Shadows; the Shadows were gone from the galaxy, along with the rest of the First Ones. If the Drakh were trying to carry on the work of their former masters, then all they wanted was conflict and chaos. They would try to start some little wars somewhere, or inflame old ethnic hatreds into new outbreaks of violence. That was the Shadow way.

But where, and who? Answering that question was the job of the Rangers. But so far, there were far too many candidates. There was a wealth of intelligence on various conflicts between members of the Interstellar Alliance. Figuring out which ones were natural, and which showed the subtle hand of Shadow servants, that was the difficult part.

So, where was the new Shadow Fleet? What was it doing, and where was it going next?

Everyone expected him to pull a rabbit out of his hat. He was the great, wily Sheridan, hero of the spaceways, defeater of the Shadows, doer of the impossible. Bah humbug.

Sheridan sighed and set down the intelligence reports. He was getting nowhere with this. Suppose he had started with the wrong assumption. He had been looking for a unified quasi-Shadow strategy. But suppose the Drakh had not simply stepped into the Shadows' shoes—if they had shoes—but had splintered into a hundred different factions, all competing against each other.

Suppose the Shadows had kept the Drakh in the same kind of conflicted, chaotic, backbiting anarchy that they tried to induce in the other races of the galaxy. Suppose the Shadows truly believed that competition was superior to co-operation. Why then would the Drakh all be working together?

He was not looking for one Drakh strategy, in one place. There might well be Drakh influence behind all of the conflicts in all these intelligence reports, not just one of them. And not just among members of the Alliance, either. The Centauri Republic had fractured during the Centauri War, and Londo's ascension to the throne had not seemed to help much. If chaos and backstabbing were the hallmark of Shadow influence—and now Drakh influence—there was plenty of that among the Centauri.

And the pirates had been Centauri. A faction, perhaps, being trained up in the arts of war and kidnapping, for use in some internal Centauri stratagem? That made sense. But it did not mean that was where the Shadow Fleet was.

The pirates. He knew the ones who had tormented him were dead, but in stray moments a rage came on him, and he wanted nothing more than to kill them all over again.

He refrained from giving in to the urge to throw something across his living room. Delenn was in the bedroom, reading. He did not want to disturb her. And he most especially did not want to have to explain why he was tossing things around. He did not think he could convince her that was what a 'throw pillow' was for.

The Babcom unit chimed. The computer's voice said, "Incoming message for Entilza Delenn or President Sheridan. Please state unscramble code."

"Flint flour sweet dent," Sheridan said. It was four types of corn, and something even most humans would not know.

"Incorrect," said the computer.

"Oh, hell." Of course Delenn had changed this code, too. She had changed all his codes. He had had a bad moment when he first came back to Babylon 5 and found that he had been locked out of Delenn's quarters. He had not realized what was going on until he went to his own quarters and found he could not open that door either. Delenn had changed all his codes after the battle at which it had become obvious that the pirates had extracted secret information from him.

"Delenn," he called into the next room. "What's my new unscramble code?"

Her voice came from behind the door. "Istilza."

"Istilza," Sheridan repeated, with a jolt of recognition. That was the word the Minbari negotiator had taught him, after the peace talks had been attacked by parties unknown, and the negotiator was dying. The old Minbari had said that Minbari would take Sheridan and Franklin prisoner, and he had been right. He had said to tell his captors, 'I know what's in Dukhat's sacred place,' and to say 'istilza.' And the old Minbari had been right again, they did let Sheridan go after he said that to the right person, the mysterious figure in the grey cloak. Sheridan had never learned what the word meant, or why it gave him safe passage.

His reverie was interrupted by the computer saying, "Unscrambling message."

A Minbari Ranger appeared on the screen, his Whitestar in the background. "We've found the Shadow Fleet. They've taken refuge on a planet at these co-ordinates, which is inhabited by machine intelligences. My guess is, it was an automated repair and recreation depot for a lost race. The robots are servicing the Shadow vessels, and providing for the physical needs of the human pilots."

An intelligence file was appended to the message. At last, Sheridan knew what to do. He did not have to fly his fleet over to the enemy and sling weapons fire at each other until one or the other fleet was all gone. This was not a job for a fleet at all. It was a job for a computer hacker. And an archeologist, and linguist.

He did not need weapons to defeat the Shadow Fleet. He would simply convince the robots to introduce toxins into the supplies they delivered to the Shadow vessels. Kill the pilots, and the ships became harmless. Then, only then, would the Whitestar Fleet move in, to mop up the Shadow Fleet as it hung rudderless in space.

Sheridan began thinking about who to include on the team. He did not know any computer hackers. But he had a fairly good idea of who to choose for the part of the team that would be devoted to understanding the machine intelligences' culture. He still had a few acquaintances among Anna's old colleagues.

Sheridan winced at the irony. Anna had ended her life as a Shadow pilot.

He went into the bedroom and announced, "I've got it. We've got them. I have a plan." Sheridan outlined his plans to sabotage the Shadow fleet.

Delenn smiled. "I knew you would think of something."

"Delenn, tell me something. What is istilza?"

"The future," she said softly. "Also, the first word I ever heard you say in Minbari. You don't know what a shock it was the first time I saw you on the station, back when I was still lodging protests with Earthdome over the appointment of 'Sheridan Starkiller' to the command of Babylon 5. I thought I was going to meet a stranger, but realized I had seen you before. That I had once held your life in my hands, and let you go. It is a good thing I did not know who you were at the time. Or I would not have canceled your execution."

"Oh, that's heartwarming," Sheridan snorted. "Hey, wait a minute. That was you in the grey robe?"

"Yes, that was me."

"So what was the riddle? 'The future'. That sounds like something Kosh would say."

"Precisely. That's who was there. We were trying to find an excuse to end the war. Another good excuse did not present itself until we captured Sinclair."

Sheridan shook his head and blew out his breath. "If you tell me you ever captured Elizabeth, it would be three for three."

"No, John, we never captured Captain Lochley."

"So, um, know any good computer hackers?"

"Leave that to me. Minbar produces many fine information scientists."

\

Carla balled up the hated patient gown and left it on the bed. She wanted to drop kick it into the hamper, but her new knee was not up to that yet.

There was no mirror in this Minbari hospital room, but she took time to look down at herself in her uniform. She admired the Anla'shok pin, with its green stone and the two figures holding it, one human, one Minbari.

Carla extended her Pike and leaned on it, and hobbled out into the hallway. Khunnier was waiting for her. "It's going to be a while before my new knee is ready to sail into battle." She was speaking Minbari, and her Coastline accent and word choice conjured up the image of a pirate ship.

"I can't stay," Khunnier said. "I must return the Starfury. But I'll see you to your hotel. The doctors here say you have to return every day for physical rehabilitation."

Carla made a face. "I can walk around and do bending exercises on a Whitestar. Or back at the training center."

"I'm sure they'll send a ship to pick you up after the battle. They just can't spare one now."

"I know."

The Anla'shok put Carla up in a modest but decent hotel. There probably were not any other kind there, Carla reflected, ostentation not being the Minbari way. Khunnier flew away, and Carla was alone.

The next day, after PT, she was supposed to go for a walk. She decided to ditch the indoor track and explore the town.

The city of Dash, which translated as 'rest', or, alternatively, as 'place to go for a night on the town', was actually a fairly pleasant little village, in a cool-toned, minimalist Minbari way. It felt strange, walking around Tifar as a tourist. Or, limping around. With her Ranger uniform and obviously injured walk, she could not have felt more conspicuous if she had been wearing her old FPFP jacket. Which was now tumbling forever in space in the wreckage of their Whitestar, according to Khunnier.

She came to a public square and saw a large crowd of Minbari, and quite a few humans. The pesky ISN crew which had come to the spaceport to meet the incoming medical emergency was there too. It looked like someone was about to make a speech.

As if thinking about her FPFP jacket had summoned him, Carla spotted Ike near the front of the crowd. He was impossible to miss, a head taller than even the tallest warrior caste Minbari in the crowd, coal black and very human. Carla looked around for the other FPFP members and saw a group she did not recognize wearing the blue and red buttons.

Carla realized this must be why an ISN crew was on Tifar in the first place. It was some kind of peace ceremony. The reporters were probably going to tie in a retrospective on the Earth-Minbari war, half look-how-far-we've-come and half history lesson for those too young to remember it. That was what they usually did these days when they mentioned it at all.

Carla made her way to the front of the crowd and tapped Ike on the back. When he turned around his expression of puzzlement, giving way rapidly to surprise and then delight, was everything she could have wished for.

"Carla. My god. You're a Ranger."

Ike's followers introduced themselves. Carla realized she knew some of them; they were some of the members of the loribond victims' support group, from before Ike founded the FPFP. Others were new FPFP members.

Carla asked, "So what's the occasion?"

"You mean you don't know?" Ike asked. "Just coincidence brought you here?"

Carla shrugged. "Maybe God sent me. Or Valen did . I am Anla'shok."

"This is the end of fear, Carla. Control is dead."

At that moment an official got up on the platform and began to address the crowd.

Carla did not respond to Ike out loud, but inside, she thought 'I have already come to the end of fear. In Valen's name, I am Anla'shok. I live for the One, I die for the One. I fear nothing now.'

Ike and the other loribond victims climbed up on the stage, and they helped Carla get up there with them. It felt very odd to have her new life, in the form of her Ranger uniform, and her old life, in the form of Ike and the FPFP and the other loribond victims, all together in the same place.

Ike went to the podium and addressed the crowd. "This is a great day for us. From this day forward, we are no longer loribond victims. We are loribond survivors. Control is dead. We have survived him."

There was applause from the humans in the crowd, and some belated clapping from Minbari would were trying to be polite by copying the humans.

Ike continued, "When I first founded the Former Prisoners For Peace, friendship between humans and Minbari was an unpopular idea. Now we're all part of the same Insterstellar Alliance. The political message of the FPFP is obsolete now. Society has accomplished our goal of peace already. In recent years, instead of going to peace rallies, the FPFP has been going to alien places. Babylon 5, Minbar, and now Tifar. We've been healing ourselves, rather than trying to fix society. And now the healing is complete. With the death of Control, the last wound has been healed. And I'm announcing the dissolution of the FPFP. We no longer need to stand up for peace. Now peace is standing up for us."

There was thunderous applause this time, and Ike waved and smiled, acknowledging it. Then he retreated from the podium.

A Minbari official started talking again, but Carla was not paying any attention. She was clambering back off the stage with the other loribond victims—loribond survivors. She wanted to ask Ike a thousand things, but had to wait for the speeches to be over.

When the officials finally left the podium, and the reporters turned off their cameras, and the crowd became noisy again, Carla asked, "How did he die?"

"Stabbed with a shiv by another prisoner," Ike responded.

"But I thought he was in a Minbari military prison."

"He was. Another Minbari killed him. Times have changed, Carla girl."

"Do you know why?"

"Why times changed is because of people like us," Ike smiled.

Carla shook her head, but she couldn't help smiling in response. That was Ike all right. He may be leaving behind the FPFP but he was not leaving behind his messianic self image.

"I know," he said. "You meant why did somebody knife him. Some argument or other, I suppose. The Minbari don't have a free press, so we don't really know every last detail of everything newsworthy. Not that human reporters don't try to cover Minbari news, but it's just not part of the Minbari tradition to share everything with the whole universe."

"Speak of the devil," Carla said, as the ISN crew approached them.

The reporters ignored the ordinary looking humans and homed in on Carla, in her visually interesting Ranger uniform. "What's your reaction to the news that Control is dead?"

"Of course it's a great relief to me that the person I'm loribonded to can no longer be a threat to me, or anyone else, if he ever escaped," Carla replied. "But I am disturbed to learn he was killed by another Minbari. In Valen's name, Minbari do not kill Minbari."

\

Sheridan paced the deck of his Whitestar. The science team had reported success on the robot planet, and now it was time to confront the Shadow fleet. If his plan did not work, a lot of people on these Whitestars were going to die. And if the plan did work, a lot of kidnapped civilians who had been made into Shadow pilots were already dead. But they were better off that way. A Shadow pilot was a zombie, not a human being.

Delenn said, "Would you relax."

Sheridan stopped pacing, but he looked far from relaxed.

Delenn invited, "Let's go to the control center."

"Alright."

The two of them entered the viewing room, and it projected a three dimensional image of the fleet. Of the two fleets, as they came into contact.

"Concentrate fire and attack," Sheridan ordered.

The Whitestar fleet attacked the Shadow fleet, bright rays of destruction lancing out at the spidery ships. Ships exploded all over space. A few of the Shadow vessels began to move, most of them sluggishly. One opened a jump point and zipped through it. Sheridan did not order pursuit. Shadow vessels could hide in hyperspace, and even a Whitestar could not match it. He would have to deal with that ship later.

Those Shadow vessels that were still moving formed up and retaliated. Several Whitestars were damaged, and three destroyed. They blew up in yellow-orange oxygen flame.

The Minbari telepaths began projecting confusion at the Shadow pilots, and then the Whitestars counterattacked. Beam weapons and torpedoes rained through space, destroying everything in their path. Bits of ships tumbled crazily everywhere.

Severed Shadow vessel spider legs lanced through space like shards of darkness.

Then it was over. The Whitestar Fleet had won.

A human Ranger at the sensor station called in to the control center and reported, "I'm showing life signs on one of the Shadow vessels. Should we launch a shuttle to recover the pilot?"

Sheridan hesitated.

"Sir?" asked the young Anla'shok.

"No. Take no prisoners."

"Sir, these are human life signs. The pilot is human."

"No she isn't," Sheridan replied, anger in his voice. "A Shadow pilot is part of the ship. There's no cure for that. They can't be saved." Sheridan's fists balled up, but there was nothing around to hit. "Gunner, destroy the surviving Shadow vessel."

Nothing happened. Delenn translated the order into Minbari, and once more bright beams of death shot across space. The Shadow vessel blew apart.

A few seconds went by, and Sheridan stretched out his fingers, getting rid of the fists but not the screaming tension in his hands.

Delenn said, "End viewing session," and the room became dark. The drifting hulks of the battle disappeared, as did the stars.

\

"This won't take long, John," Delenn said as she gave Sheridan a good-bye embrace in the shuttle hatch.

"Take as long as you need, I'll be visiting a friend. What is this Anla'shok business you have on Tifar?"

"Private Anla'shok business," Delenn replied.

"Alright, be that way. See you later. I love you."

"And I you, John."

Delenn went down to Tifar's only spaceport in a commercial shuttle, although she was the only passenger. Sheridan flew down to Dash in one of the Whitestar's Minbari fighters, and so he was directed to the military airfield, even though the base was closed. As a result, although the fighter was much faster than the shuttle, he was a few minutes behind Delenn as they converged on the physical rehabilitation center attached to Dash's hospital.

Delenn found Carla struggling through a flexibility exercise. A female Minbari healer was coaxing just a little more bend from Carla's new knee.

Carla sat up when she saw her visitor. "Entilza Delenn!" Carla was startled that Ranger One had come to see her, but she was grateful for the interruption. The healer was much more sensitive to Carla's emotions than she was used to in a physical trainer. That was to be expected, since her only other experiences of the type were Marine drill sergeants and Ranger combat instructors. But the process of breaking in her new knee was still physically uncomfortable.

Delenn addressed the healer. "I must speak with the Anla'shok privately."

The healer withdrew to the far side of the room, and began working on some kind of form on a handcomp.

"What is your name?" Delenn asked.

"Carla."

"Anla'shok Carla. I have been told that you have claimed jurisdiction over the crime committed against you in the name of the Anla'shok, overriding local security forces, as is only proper. However, I have also been told that you not only refuse to disclose the name of the human involved to the local police, but to the Anla'shok as well. Anla'shok do not face the terror alone. The entire Anla'shok is behind you. You must bring us in on this."

Carla said, "If there's some action being planned against the pirates, I want to be in on it."

"There is," Delenn said. "But I have been asked to speak to you because you will not speak to anyone else. Everyone is saying you are protecting someone. I have even heard that you destroyed the samples taken in evidence after the initial screening, to prevent the identity of the human male from being revealed."

"Yes, I did," Carla said. "It was easy. They didn't even have them locked up."

"Why?"

"Humans are weird about this crime, Entilza Delenn. In our history, it was considered a great shame."

"It is. Those responsible must be found and punished."

"For the victims," Carla said. "We've been working against that for hundreds of years, and we've made a lot of progress. But it's still a disgrace. Especially for the male victims. I got a look inside the heads of a lot of male victims, in the loribond victims' support group. Every one of us passed through level three testing on our way to becoming fully loribonded. You can't imagine the dishonor, Entilza. There's nothing like it in Minbari culture."

"So you're saying this human you are protecting is another victim?"

"Yes. Of course he is. Surely you didn't think he was a willing participant. I know it's hard to believe that a male can be forced that way, but Inoja had the technology to do it. But I don't expect the general public to understand. I'll never let this get out. It could shatter the Alliance. And I don't want that to be my legacy. The last thing I'd ever want to do is bring him down in a sex scandal."

"Who?"

Carla went slack jawed. "You don't know?"

"No, I do not know. You will not tell anyone. That is why I am here. No one else could get you to talk to them. I don't know whether the Anla'shok asked me to speak with you because I am female, or because I am Entilza. But I ask you now, as Entilza, to tell me who you are protecting. As long as you are Anla'shok, you must do as I tell you."

The obvious next step occurred to Carla. Someone had boxed Delenn into a corner, and demanded that she get the name from Carla, as Entilza. There was no possibility that Delenn would want this revealed either, so obviously the next thing that would happen would be that Carla would be kicked out. When she was no longer Anla'shok, she no longer had to obey Entilza. A neat and tidy package.

It was happening all over again. Everything she had worked for would be taken away from her. Tears ran down Carla's cheeks. She covered her face in her hands.

"Carla," Delenn said softly. "I know this is difficult. But we are all behind you."

Once she started crying, Carla could not stop. She curled up on the exercise mat and sobbed.

The healer hurried over. She handed Carla a disposable towel and put an arm around her.

Delenn asked gently, "Who is it, Carla?"

Carla sniffed, wiped her face, and looked up through streaming eyes. "I'm not the person you should be hearing about this from, Entilza Delenn." Then she buried her face in the healer's shoulder.

"Please go," the healer told Delenn. "You are upsetting the patient."

Delenn nodded and went out into the corridor. To her surprise, Sheridan was walking down the hallway towards her.

"John? Is something wrong?"

"No," he replied, smiling and giving her a passing pat on the arm. He looked inside, and then his face closed. His eyes and his voice were as hard as stone. "What did you say to her to make her cry like that?"

"It is Anla'shok business," Delenn said.

"She got through that whole terrible ordeal with the pirates without breaking down."

"You know her. This is the friend you were coming to see."

"Yes. I don't really know if she'll want to talk to me, but…"

"Yes, perhaps you can get through to her. She has this strange notion that if she simply tells the truth, that the human involved was another victim, and tells us who he is, that something terrible will happen, and it will be a great scandal and disgrace. She says that for humans the shame falls on the victim."

Sheridan said, "Well she's right. Humans do think that way."

"Well, that's ridiculous."

"Don't you go telling me my feelings are ridiculous." Sheridan's voice edged up in anger.

"I didn't mean that. And I didn't mean to upset your friend, either. She deserves some much needed rest."

"I think she deserves a medal. Hell, I think she deserves her own command. I can't think of anybody I'd rather have as the captain of our latest Whitestar, to go hunt down the Shadow fusion pirate ship."

"That could be arranged," Delenn said. "But first I must know who she is protecting."

"Me. She's protecting me, Delenn."

"You," Delenn whispered. There was horror on her face.

"See, that's why. That's why we feel that way." He turned away. "I disgust you."

"No. No, John, not at all." Delenn turned him around and embraced him. "Tell me what happened."

"It's unspeakable," he whispered.

Their tight hug lasted a long time. Delenn did not push him to talk. John was like that, and she accepted it.

Finally Sheridan let go. "We need to fix this for Carla. I can still hear her crying in there. I think a ship would be nice get-well present, don't you?"

Delenn nodded, and they went back in. Carla's eyes were closed.

"Carla," Sheridan said quietly. He made two small, abortive movements as if to touch her shoulder, but let his hand fall back to his side.

She looked up, and then wiped her face on the towel.

"I just—" Sheridan began. "Delenn just found out what she came here to find out. I'm sorry, both of you. Like the old saying goes, what we have here is a failure to communicate."

Carla tried to smile in appreciation of the Earth humor, but she was still crying. "The pirate adventure wasn't all bad," she husked. "The medic says I lost 20 kilos."

"Yeah, me too, all of it brown."

Carla put a hand over her mouth. She was unsure if Sheridan were making a joke.

"So. Um. There's a new Whitestar about to roll off the production lines. Whitestars are captained by Rangers. Do you want the job?"

"Really?" Carla asked. She looked at Delenn.

Delenn answered, "Yes. Your first mission would be to hunt down the Shadow/human fusion pirate ship. It's reappeared, obviously with a new crew. The Neon class freighter reappeared also, and only a Shadow vessel could have retrieved it. So there may be a Shadow vessel still out there too."

The tears stopped flowing, and Carla smiled. She wiped her face on the towel again and set it aside. "I didn't dare dream of it. I'd be overjoyed. Thank you."

"The new Whitestar must be crewed from scratch," Delenn said.

"I know who I want for my chief engineer. The Whitestars were originally crewed by religious because when the first Whitestars were built, you were keeping them a secret from the military caste for political reasons. Those reasons no longer apply. There are humans and even a few other Alliance races on Whitestars now. There's no reason not to start integrating the military caste."

"You're right," said Sheridan. "And you're talking about Firuun, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'll square it with his Captain if he agrees to the transfer. Any other officers in mind?"

"Yes. Khunnier. For tac officer."

"Done. That is, if his commander in chief doesn't mind," Sheridan said, looking at Delenn.

"Khunnier is Anla'shok, I take it. Yes, of course," Delenn said. "And the rest of the crew?"

"I want a crew of the military caste."

"There may be some delay, then," Delenn said. "I will have to negotiate for it, not just order a crew rounded up. But you are right. This will be good for us in the long term. Leave it to a human to see that things need not stay the same simply because that is the way they are done."

\

Claire Heilig was an anchor now. It was only a morning show, and she was one of three anchors, but it was still a long step up. Her scoop of the Sheridan interrogation footage had been her big break. She had destroyed the rest of the wargames vid so that no one could ever prove it was fake news.

Claire said, "Polls are showing a surprise lead for the surprise candidate. Reginald Sands appears to be getting a substantial sympathy vote over the mysterious assassination of his brother, Cedric Sands, who was the previous Regulationist Party candidate."

"Well, I think it's not just sympathy, Claire, he's also made a tremendous impression of strength in the face of his obvious grief."

"What do you think of his accusation that the assassin was an alien of a race called the Drakh?"

"Well, Claire, there's no evidence one way or the other, the whole shipyard was destroyed, so it's impossible to examine the body. I understand they barely recovered enough DNA to make a positive ID."

\

The crew was assembled outside the Whitestar. They stood in crisp ranks, military to the bone.

Carla suppressed a smile at her own pun. The crew was military to the bone, all right. Their head bones were much spikier than other castes'. Kunnier's religious caste origins made him look small and childlike next to his crewmates, but his Anla'shok uniform made up for it.

Carla tried her best not to limp as she walked midway up the ship's ramp and then turned to address her new crew. The height of the ramp brought her level with Firuun's eyes, and so above everyone else.

"I am Captain Carla Punch. It is my honor to become the Captain of this fine ship, and this unique crew. I asked for a crew of the military caste for several reasons. The biggest reason is this: that it is high time the military got to be in on the only real action that's going on in the galaxy. War cruisers hang around Minbari space waiting for someone to attack, so they can defend it. Necessary, but not terribly exciting. Whitestars go where the fighting is."

Carla had been thinking of Firuun when she wrote that part of her speech. Since her audience was standing at attention, she could not tell if they were cheering inside or not.

"Second, I think you can get better performance out of this ship in combat than a crew trained for praying rather than fighting. I expect you to prove me right. Third, I joined the Anla'shok in the first place for a chance to be military again. That's a long story, and I won't keep you standing out here to hear it. Not when there are pirates out there to hunt."

That was the end of her prepared remarks, but Carla just had to comment on the situation. "It's a strange thing, to be here on the military airfield of the abandoned base of Tifar, to take command of my new ship. I used to live right over there." She gestured to some low barracks. But of course, no one looked. They were at attention.

Carla shook her head. This was no time to get maudlin, or to make her new crew uncomfortable with her. Old war stories could wait.

"Welcome to the crew of Whitestar 97. Let's see what she can do. Stations!"

\

Khunnier came up with the pattern. The pirates themselves might not have been aware that there was a pattern to their attacks, but Khunnier had predicted where they would hit next: in the shipping lanes between Brakiri and Pakmera space.

The navigator had found the only cover in the area, an old debris field from some ancient, forgotten war. Whitestar 97 was running silent, its jump engines shut down.

Carla sat in the Captain's chair, looking out at space through the bridge window. But her eyes flicked to the viewscreen's tactical plot as she noticed movement. It was a Brakiri freighter, moving in the ponderous way of a merchanter loaded for bear.

Carla whispered, "Time to hunt the white whale."

It only took a few minutes for the pirate ship to appear. "Confirmed enemy contact!" Khunnier barked smartly, sounding very much like his military crewmates.

"Power up," Carla ordered. "Everything live. Make attack run."

The ship's walls seemed to glow in happiness as it glided out of the debris field, a hawk on the hunt.

"Fire at will," Carla ordered.

Lances of light shot out at the black ship. It turned to fight, and shot back with energy weapons and torpedoes.

The freighter ran for it, but its top speed was not very fast. It would be an hour before they could make their turn and get to the jump gate. The gate was the only reason any shipping came here.

Torpedoes sped toward the Whitestar.

"Evasive action," Carla commanded.

The military pilot started skip-dancing, a maneuver usually performed by fighter craft. The Whitestar was limber enough to pull it off, with a real combat pilot at the helm. The torpedoes passed harmlessly by, to detonate in the cold, dark wrecks of ancient ships in the debris field.

The gunner returned fire at the pirate ship, and a red and yellow explosion bloomed from the center of the target. The pirate ship's black spider legs were undamaged, though, and the ship tore off at a crazy angle, avoiding the follow-up shots.

The Whitestar sped after them, targeting the weak spot just aft of the damaged area. The two ships fought like a snake and mongoose. Finally the Whitestar's gunner scored a hit on the Spiderdrive, and the black legs deflated. The pirate ship started trying to slow itself and come about on thrusters, but they were not powerful enough to keep the pirate ship from falling into the debris field and colliding with an old wreck.

Gouts of fire erupted between the pirate ship and the derelict.

"Jump point forming!" called Khunnier at the tactical station. "Shadow vessel!"

"Finish off the pirate ship," Carla ordered. "Then engage the Shadow vessel."

The gunner fired torpedoes at the pirate ship, confident it could not get out of the way. Then the Whitestar spun around to target the Shadow vessel. The torpedoes exploded, utterly destroying the Shadow/human fusion ship, seconds after the Shadow vessel entered the debris field, apparently attempting to come to the pirates' rescue.

"Follow them in," Carla ordered.

The Whitestar entered the debris field, whirling around the wreckage, firing off bursts at the Shadow vessel whenever the gunner had a good target.

The Shadow vessel turned and attacked. As it came close, a terrible scream echoed in the minds of the Whitestar's Captain and crew, like a wave of darkness coming to drown the land beneath the sea.

In the moment of distraction, the Shadow vessel scored a direct hit on the Whitestar's beam weapons, taking them out.

"Helm, get us out of the debris field so we can have a clear shot for torpedoes."

The pilot started weaving through the maze of debris toward open space. But the Shadow vessel ran right up their wake and fired, taking out the Whitestar's engines. The Whitestar shuddered as the engines blew.

"Shut down!" Carla ordered. "Shut everything down! Play dead!"

In the sudden silence as the ship powered down, Carla heard the dull snap of automatic pressure doors falling into place. 'Firuun is back there', Carla thought. "Send damage control and rescue parties to engineering." She marveled at how calm her voice sounded. She did not feel calm at all.

The Shadow vessel left them and went to investigate the ruins of the pirate ship, as if looking for survivors. That was not the way Shadow vessels usually acted. But Shadow vessels were not piloted by Shadows, but by humans or other enslaved beings, and if they were taking their orders from the Drakh instead of the Shadows these days, it was only natural that their tactics would change.

"It looks like they've bought our playing-dead act," Carla said. "We've bought ourselves some time. To make repairs, and to plan."

A half hour later, Carla was holding a strategy session in sickbay, so that Firuun could attend. He had a broken arm, broken ribs, and some crush damage to his internal organs. The medics wanted him to stay on the monitors until they were sure his organs were not going to shut down on him.

Carla had never realized how dangerous a ship's engineer's job was. When she had been a Marine, she had always thought the ground-pounders took all the risks while the Navy boys sat back in their sanitary flying forts drinking tea.

Carla, Khunnier, and the key bridge officers were standing around Firuun's bed. Minbari ships were not big on chairs.

Firuun was not, of course, lying down. His bed was tilted at the angle of life, and his deep, powerful voice made up for any illusion of weakness the monitors may have implied.

"The engines are gone," Firuun boomed. "There's no question of repair outside of a shipyard.

"Weapons?" Carla asked.

"The torpedo tubes are fused, and we don't have power for the ray weapons."

Khunnier said, "Then there's not much we can do."

The pilot said, "I thought you were supposed to be some kind of tactical genius."

"What is there to work with?" Khunnier asked.

"Actually," Firuun said. "There's still the torpedoes."

"Which we can't use," said the gunner.

Firuun grinned viciously. "We can't fire. But we still have the torpedo warheads."

Carla asked, "What do you have in mind, Firuun?"

"The Sheridan Maneuver."

It took Carla a moment to realize what Firuun meant. Then an answering grin broke onto her face. "Space mines."

"Yes. We mine the debris field," Firuun said. "I can convert the torpedoes to proximity fuses easily enough. Remote detonation would require slight modification, but I can do it. In fact, I could do both, and then it would be a properly redundant system."

The gunner objected, "Mines are not an honorable weapon."

Firuun reached out with his good arm and grabbed the gunner, pulling him in close. "It's the Sheridan Maneuver. Nobody insults Sheridan while I'm around. Got it?"

"Sure," said the gunner nervously. Firuun let him go.

"Wise move," Carla said. "You ought to have seen the squad of gropos he beat up for insulting Sheridan. Not a dry nose in the house."

Firuun laughed like a cannon.

"Get your department right on that," Carla told Firuun. "They'll have to go out in work suits to position the mines."

"We only have two powered work suits," Firuun said, "So this will take a while."

"I know. We can't save the freighter. It'll be another half an hour before it can reach the jump gate. We'll just have to hope the Shadow vessel continues to ignore it, while it's engaged in the rescue operation with the pirate ship. Or salvage, or whatever it's doing."

The engineers modified the torpedo warheads into mines. As the department with the most familiarity with the powered work suits, they also went out into space to position and arm the mines.

Altogether it took about three hours before the two engineers were back inside the ship. Luck was with the freighter; the Shadow vessel had shown no interest in it, and the freighter had jumped long ago.

Carla was back in the Captain's seat. "Now for the here kitty kitty part," Carla said. "Turn ship's systems on. Send a distress signal."

The Shadow vessel responded to the signal by nosing carefully over towards the Whitestar, taking its time with navigating the debris field.

"That's right," Carla whispered. "Come to me. Just a little closer."

The Shadow vessel reached the center of the minefield. The proximity fuses blew. All of space went white for a moment. Carla and her Minbari crew reflexively held their hands up in front of their faces to block the terrible light coming from the bridge windows. But the flash of the explosion was over by then.

Someone shouted, "Yes!"

The Whitestar rocked a little in the shockwave, and the viewscreen switched itself off. A few other computerized systems went down, but they came back up as the Whitestar's walls pulsed in self-healing.

Carla had never been more aware that her ship was in some sense alive, a biotechnology based on Vorlon science that she could not hope to understand.

"Tactical," Carla said. "Is the enemy destroyed?"

An agonizing second's pause, and then Khunnier's young voice said, "Yes. The Shadow vessel has withered, Captain. It's dead."

It too had been alive, Shadow biotechnology. The Shadows and the Vorlons were both gone from the galaxy, but their legacy remained.

"Well done, crew. Get some rest. There's nothing to do now but wait for a tow."

The End


	7. Chapter 7

The Dark Horse Votes Neigh

This is the 7th and final chapter in the Dark Horse series.

Carla's ship was taken in tow by a Minbari war cruiser. The large, old ship was a long way from its normal hunting grounds, but Carla had to admit it was a good choice for a tow truck. It handled the mass of the comparatively tiny Whitestar with ease.

After they had been underway for a day, the war cruiser's captain invited Carla and her senior officers to dine with him and his officers. Carla hesitated over who to bring along with her. Firuun, of course, but other than him, all her officers had come aboard fresh from training. She decided on the pilot, nav and com officer, gunner, and of course the tac officer, Khunnier.

Firuun had a medical immobilizer on his arm, but was back to his usual energy level, and his voice boomed like a cannon as he greeted the war cruiser's officers.

The guests filed into the dining hall of the war cruiser's captain's suite, and Carla looked around with interest at the decorations on the walls. They appeared to be sculpture of some kind, but Carla wondered if they might have some use of which she was unaware. "This is a very nice dining hall," she told the Captain in Minbari.

"Yes, a generously sized table," replied the Captain. "My suite is just through there."

"I thought Minbari didn't have private cabins," Carla commented. "A collective culture."

The Captain smiled. "No, that is an artifact of the Whitestar's small size. Your ship has a higher drive and weapons to crew area ratio than a war cruiser. The war cruiser was meant to be a home for its crew for many years, possibly permanently. The Whitestar was designed to be crewed by religious who would go home to their temples after the Shadow War."

Carla wondered if there were a shower aboard this ship, but did not get the chance to ask.

The Captain introduced his officers by both name and clan name, so Carla did likewise.

The Captain gestured politely to the chairs. "Please be seated." Everyone sat, except for the servers, who appeared by their youth to be junior officers, perhaps the equivalent of middies.

A late arrival came to the table, although Carla did not hear him walk up the corridor, as if he had waited just around the corner for the introductions to be finished. The Minbari Captain pointedly did not introduce the newcomer.

But Carla recognized him. Her breath caught in her throat.

She felt as dizzy as she had aboard the Neon class merchantman when the air was being pumped out. She wanted to get up and leave the gathering, but was afraid of showing weakness in front of her crew. And in front of the other Minbari as well.

She took deep breaths, staring blankly at the table.

"Carla?" Firuun asked, as quietly as he could. Which was not very quiet. "Are you alright?"

Carla looked up white-faced, and clutched Firuun's arm. The good arm, fortunately. "I'm fine, Firuun." Her voice came out high and weak to her ears. "This is… the person who taught me to speak Minbari."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

Khunnier figured it out. "Comac," he whispered. Carla nodded.

Comac of Clan Itma spoke in precisely the same accent as Carla. "I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?!" Carla shrieked. She grabbed a fork as if planning to stab him with it.

Firuun put a hand on her shoulder as if prepared to hold her in her seat. He whispered, "Carla, this isn't a bar. We can't fight in here."

"For not recognizing you," Comac said.

Carla subsided. She set down the utensil and took a drink of whatever it was she had been served, which did not seem nearly poisonous enough for the occasion.

Comac continued, "I would not have come if I had known. The Captain and I thought if I was not introduced, it would avoid any awkwardness."

Not looking at anyone, Carla said, "I survived the pirate base. And having my ship nearly blown out from under me. I suppose I can survive this too."

"I'll go," Comac said, "with my Captain's permission?"

Carla said, "Wait. The Anla'shok taught me to confront my fears, not avoid them. If I can't get through this dinner with you here, then I give in to terror. Therefore you must stay. It is our way."

"The way of the Anla'shok," Comac said. "I see. You are a remarkable person, Captain. If I may ask, who are you?"

Carla sighed. "I can understand why you wouldn't recognize my face. I've gotten rather weather-beaten since then. Humans age faster than Minbari. And I was young and fit and beautiful once. There." Carla pulled up a sleeve, showing the old, white scars of hundreds of scratches. "Do you recognize me now?"

Carla had been one of his first baltor mar victims, before he started restraining the prisoners to keep them from injuring themselves with scratching. Later subjects had the V-marks instead. In the original group of prisoners who had the scratch scars, there had been only one female.

There was another very awkward pause.

Comac studied the lacework scars, clearly struggling to remember the name from so long ago. Then he said, "First Sergeant Carla Punch. Gropo."

Carla pulled down the sleeve. She whispered, "Everyone, please eat."

Khunnier muttered, "I don't think the others have much of an appetite." He started eating; he had known about Carla's past for a long time.

Carla glanced up at her other officers, the fresh faced young fellows who had jumped at the chance to be the first military caste officers to serve on a Whitestar. Like Khunnier, they were all far too young to remember the Earth-Minbari war. They all looked mortified.

The Minbari Captain said, "I apologize, Captain Punch. I thought I was arranging a social gathering, a mere courtesy. Not a test of your resolve as a member of the Anla'shok."

"The past is past," Carla said in a brittle tone. "Actually, the Centauri pirate, Inoja, did far worse things. Of course, I got to kill her, so that's alright."

"I would appreciate it if you did not murder my chief of security," the Minbari Captain said dryly.

"Don't worry. I'm not capable of killing a Minbari. That's one of the commands I still live with, even though Control is dead."

"I don't understand," the Minbari Captain said. He glanced at Comac for an explanation, but Comac was stirring the contents of his plate with a congealed expression on his face.

It was Firuun who provided the explanation, in a low rumble like a far away rocket engine. He waited until several people raised glasses to their lips to cover the silence. "Captain Punch is loribonded."

Which caused every Minbari at the table who had been drinking something to spray his tablemates. Carla thought that was a rather amusing sight, and pressed her lips together and held her breath for a moment to keep the laughter in. Giggling hysterically at this moment would not contribute to her reputation for sanity.

Her old pain had little power over her now. It had been replaced by new pain, but also, all the traumas, old and new, had been eclipsed by a feeling that she was finally home. Her Whitestar might not have much in the way of amenities, but it was more than she had ever hoped to have. She was a Ranger, and a ship captain. And that was enough.

"Enough about the past," Carla said. "Let's talk ships. Have you heard about the new super-Whitestar designs?"

A relieved buzz of voices started up as everyone jumped on the change of topic.

Carla looked at her hands: they were not shaking. Her voice had steadied out. The dizzy feeling was gone. The Anla'shok way served her well; she was OK. She was amazed that she was OK.

\

"For a so called 'very exclusive party' there seem to be a whole lot of people here, Michael."

"So, maybe a thousand or so," Garibaldi said, snagging a drink from a passing float-tray. "That is exclusive. Do you know how many people there are in the galaxy? Just counting humans, it's in the billions."

"Mm. Well, so far it's turning out to be a much nicer evening than the last time I went with you to Mars."

"You know that wasn't my fault."

"Of course I know that. Or I wouldn't be here. And neither would you."

"Yeah, good to know where we stand on that, John. Speaking of second chances, I believe I see one of my fellow excessively rich men making his way in our direction."

The newcomer was barely recognizable, and it was not just the expensive blue suit with the fashionable gold collar tips. Lines had appeared in his face since Sheridan had seen him last. "Great party, Michael. Hello, Sheridan." The man gestured with his martini.

"Do I recognize you?" Sheridan asked.

"I hope not."

Sheridan narrowed his eyes, and tilted his face a bit. "Major Sands?"

"Not anymore. I resigned my commission, you know."

"Well, this is a bit public for anything that might need to be said."

Party noise was all around them: the clink of ice in glasses, the murmur of conversations, mostly in English but in a few dozen other human and alien languages as well, live music drifting in from the ballroom. Men in suits, women in glittering cocktail dresses, and various aliens brushed past them.

"Consider whatever needs to be said, said then," Reginald suggested. "The last thing we need is for people to start saying 'secret meeting.' There are already gossip logs claiming to show photos of Rangers coming in and out of my ranch."

Sheridan tried for a fake chuckle, which came out as more of a whuff. "Someone would really have to be a conspiracy buff to believe you and I are in on anything together."

Garibaldi said, "I take it you two have met."

"Don't you watch ISN, Michael?"

"Not if I can help it."

"Well. Everything worked out. The pirate menace is gone, and everything that went with it. I call that a successful operation."

"No hard feelings?" Sands asked.

"I haven't got time to bother holding a grudge against anybody who's not actively fighting me right now. Besides, we were both on the same side, in the end, weren't we? Earth's side."

Sands nodded. That last line had been directed at potential eavesdroppers, he was sure. The general public still thought Sands and Sheridan had been on opposite sides of the Earth civil war.

Reginald said, "You're a very forgiving man, John Sheridan."

"I have to be, I'm married to Delenn."

Reginald saluted Sheridan and Garibaldi with his drink and excused himself.

Sheridan said, "How popular is he getting, Michael?"

"In the polls, you mean? Not bad."

"Can he win?"

"Not a chance. Not this time around, anyway. The Regulationist Party is dead in the water. And it will be as long as Earth-gov is still rounding up underground Nightwatch militias."

"Good. I'd hate to think I had anything to do with catapulting them back into power."

"So, care to tell me what's going on?"

"Not particularly, no. Of course, if you were to reconsider coming back as chief of covert intelligence…" Sheridan shrugged.

"Number One's doing a fine job with that. And representing Mars's interests. And I've got a company to run, you know."

"Yes. I hear your shipyards are doing quite well. Especially now that the competition has been reduced, thanks to that tragedy in the asteroid belt."

"Come on, what's going on?"

"Don't nag, Michael, someone might mistake you for a horse. Or part of one, anyway."

"Well, at least I'd be at home in the middle of all this horse pucky."

"Ah, look, there's the head of the Minbari trade consortium. I've been meaning to meet him. I've never met a worker caste Minbari. Excuse me."

Sheridan made his way across the room. Garibaldi was left shaking his head. Whatever the story was, he would get to the bottom of it eventually.

\

"Is it good news or bad news, Firuun?" Carla asked.

"That depends on your perspective. The yard dogs want everybody off while they graft on the new engine module. That's bad news for the Anla'shok purser in charge of repair operations, because they're going to have to put us all up in a hotel. At least until most of the crew disperses for home leave, anyway. You get to stay the entire time the ship's being repaired."

"Yes!" Carla laughed. "Just tell me it has a shower!"

"Rated for humans. I checked."

"Thank you, Firuun. And I'm sure the crew will thank you too." Carla waved a hand in front of her face to signify an odor.

"We weren't going to say anything."

"You don't have to. So are you going to visit family?"

"Yes, for a few days. Just long enough for everyone to hear all my latest stories two or three times, and get tired of me. But first, there's a bar here in the spaceport that I've been wanting to introduce you to."

Carla grinned. "Is it a place appropriate to the dignity of a starship captain?"

"Not in the slightest."

"Excellent. Meet you there after I check in?"

"And have your shower. I took the liberty of requisitioning you an extra uniform. It's waiting for you in the closet. Along with a laundry order ticket for that one."

Carla laughed again. "I knew there was some reason I made you my exec."

"I can hardly wait to see the look on my mother's face when I tell her I'm the first officer of my ship. Do you know how rare that is for someone in the engineering specialty? They told me I was wasting my talents and would never get to command rank. They thought someone with my physique should have gone for a combat assignment."

"Well, you are good at fighting. And you enjoy it. But you're a damned good engineer, too."

"Not to mention the fact that I would have died on the Blackstar if I hadn't been outside in a powered work suit when it blew. The family always seems to conveniently forget that part when they nettle me about being an engineer."

Carla nodded, suddenly serious. She tried to picture visiting her own family now that she had her new life. "If I went home wearing this uniform, my dad would probably try to have me locked up in an adjustment clinic specializing in Minbari War Syndrome. My mom, my mom would just say, 'oh good, you're dressed, take out the garbage.'"

"Mm. Well, then you could join our club."

"Huh?"

"I'll tell you tonight. Oh, the yard dogs wanted to know if we'd like them to refill the air with one of their specialty mixes, while they're at it. The ship will have to be opened to space to replace the engine compartment. I wasn't sure which ones might be agreeable to humans."

"What have they got?"

"Woods. Rain. Wildflowers. Spice."

"Humans would have had an Ocean scent in that selection."

"Not us. We don't like the ocean. Well, except for people who talk like you."

"Anything, as long as the wildflowers don't smell like springtime on Tifar. Scent linked memories are powerfully emotional for my species."

Firuun snapped off a parody of a human style salute with his newly healed arm, and boomed in English, "Aye, aye, Cap'n! No wildflowers shall pass these airlocks!"

Carla grinned. Maybe they could find someone to fight in the bar. It would be just like old times.

The End


End file.
